What Are Breadcrumbs in SEO and Why They are Important?

In this article, you will learn how to use breadcrumbs in your website for increasing your SEO value.

What are Breadcrumbs?              

Breadcrumbs are navigational components of the website used to create a great UX and boost crawlability. You can easily backtrack the pages you have visited with the help of breadcrumbs, plus they are really easy to implement!

Types of Breadcrumbs:

·         Hierarchy based breadcrumbs

·         Attribute-based or Dynamic breadcrumbs

·         History-based breadcrumbs

Are Breadcrumbs good for SEO?

The main role of breadcrumbs is to make navigation easier for users.

Google has mentioned in its various notes the importance of using breadcrumbs. It offers dual benefit; one for the user and other for the search engines.

You can see the example of breadcrumbs clearly in the snapshot below:

Crawlers may recognize breadcrumbs and can obtain more information about a web page and site using the breadcrumb framework. Just like internal links, breadcrumbs help users to find information easily and keep them on your website for more time thus reducing the bounce rate and increasing Avg session duration. 

Use Breadcrumb Schema:

By adding a simple piece of code to your website’s HTML code you can make it easy for the search engines to understand the content and crawl the web pages efficiently. Structured data can increase your chances of ranking at the 0^th position in the SERP as a featured snippet.

The relevant schema markup is BreadcrumbList.

There are 3 required properties for BreadcrumbList Schema

1.       Item: Specific Page URL

2.       Name: Breadcrumb title

3.       Position: Position of the item in the breadcrumb trail

Sample Breadcrumb Code:

1.      

<script type="application/ld+json">

2. {

3. "@context": "https://schema.org",

4. "@type": "BreadcrumbList",

5. "itemListElement":

6. [

7. {

8. "@type": "ListItem",

9. "position": 1,

10. "item":

11. {

12. "@id": "https://abcsoftware.com/websitedesigns",

13. "name": "Website Designs"

14. }

15. },

16. {

17. "@type": "ListItem",

18. "position": 2,

19. "item":

20. {

21. "@id": "https:// abcsoftware.com/websitedesigns/templates ",

22. "name": "Templates"

23. }

24. }

25. ]

26. }

27. </script>

Which plugins to use for implementing breadcrumbs?

Yoast SEO Plugin (WordPress)-The support for breadcrumbs is integrated into the Yoast SEO plugin. Make sure you switch “On” the breadcrumb support in this plugin.