Breadcrumbs are a useful navigation tool indeed. Nowadays they have been given a "best practice" vote by the customer experience minded folks. Indeed Jakob Neilsen, king of usability says in a post Breadcrumb Navigation Increasingly Useful.
I know I like a page to have breadcrumb navigation. It makes it easy to jump up a level or up a couple of levels without going back to "home".
I often think of pages as being "parents" or "children" in a site. If the home page is your Matriachal Great Grandmother, the category homepage might be the grandfather (her son), the product group page the mother (his daughter) and the product page the child (her son)...
Home > Category > Product Grouping > Product
or...
Great Grandmother > Grandfather > Mother > Child
What have breadcrumbs got to do with SEO?
Breadcrumbs have everything to do with SEO. The search engine spiders will use your internal linking structure to determine which pages you think are most important. If you link more often to a page yourself, you must think it's important and search engines take that logic onboard when mapping out your site. Given that a breadcrumb consists of many links on all pages, it's a good place to start.
Step 1 - The basic state
Imagine the following (hypothetical) site with 4 levels in it's heirachy:
Home (1 page) > Category pages (8 pages) > Product grouping pages (30 pages per category) > Product pages (200 per category grouping).
This gives me a site with 6,249 unique pages.
Assume that the homepage does not have a breadcrumb, but that all the others pages have one do according to the site structure given above.
The total count of links into each page type created by breadcrumbs will be
Homepage: 8 + 240 + 48,000 = 48,248
Product category page: 6,030
Product grouping page: 200
Product page: 0
In this example, the homepage gets a huge number of links. After that, the page that gets most links from breadcrumbs is the product category page. The product page itself is not getting any links.
Step 2 - The medium state
You may not be happy about sending all of your links to your category pages. Perhaps on your website these pages are not the ones that you want to rank highest. Maybe your aim is to get the product grouping pages to rank higher. What can you do?
The next step is to try and add in some peer to peer linking. By this I mean linking from every page to all of it's "brothers and sisters". This could be done using say a side navigation bar. From a a usability point of view it might make sense as well - your users will be able to browse in a horizontal fashion. We do all the time in the real world. When we look at a pair of trousers in a clothes shop, we look at many pairs before trying some on - you wouldn't expect to have to go to the aisle end every time you'd looked at a pair.
The lower down pages in the heirachy have more sisters and brothers than the ones above them in the heirachy.
New links from "brother / sister" linking:
Homepage: 0
Product category page: 7
Product grouping page: 29
Product page: 199
Let's also assume also that your site template has "tabs" in the header that link to all of the category pages, plus the homepage.
New links from primary navigation (tabs)
Homepage: 6,248
Product category page: 6,248
Product grouping page: 6,248
Product page: 6,248
The new totals for internal links now stand as follows...
Homepage: 54,496
Product category page: 12,285
Product grouping page: 6,477
Product page: 6,447
We're getting there, but our category grouping pages need more help.
Step 3 - The advanced state
I'm still need more links to my product grouping pages. These are the ones I want to see top of Google's rankings.
What can I do?
Here's a simple idea. Link to every product grouping page from my site footer. This appears on every page of the site, that's another 6248 links (one from every page on the site) to each product grouping page.
New totals:
Homepage: 54,496
Product category page: 12,285
Product grouping page: 12,726
Product page: 6,447
Step 4 - The enlightened state
Here's the crunch point. Here's where you might want to mess with your nice neat site structure to benefit SEO. It could comprimise your usability, maybe not.
Here's what you do.
Change from:
Home > Category > Grouping > Product
To
Home > Category
And
Home > Grouping > Product
The Category page still has home as it's parent. However, if you navigate from this page onto the Grouping page your breadcrumb does not show the category page as the parent, it will still show Home as the parent.
"No no!", I hear the purists cry. I agree that this is less than optimal for usability, but just remember this - that your category pages are still accessible through the tabs.
Why do this? Well, if I do some calculations on the resulting link count per page it now ends up like this:
Homepage: 54,496
Product category page: 6,256
Product grouping page: 12,726
Product page: 6,447
Apart from my homepage, my product grouping pages (all 30 of them) are the highest linked pages on the site.
Job done. Or maybe not. You could still do more...
Step 5 - Linking nirvana
You might want to consider adding some "children" to your product pages. How about "product reviews", "colour options", and "sizing options". That's 3 pages per product page (6000 products), so that's another 18,000 pages you've just added to your site. That's 18,000 footer links, 18,000 header links and 18,000 breadcrumbs from pages you're not too fussed about whether they rank or not. What does that do to your link count?
Homepage: 72,497
Product category page: 6,256
Product grouping page: 48,726
Product page: 24,448
Now we're rocking.
Summary
I hope I've got the maths correct in this post. If you find any errors be sure to let me know, but either way, the principles behind it do work.
1 comment:
I never heard of breadcrumbs before..!! Thanx for all the information..
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