SEO and Bread Crumbs Navigation

Sunday, March 2, 2008

SEO or search engine optimization is all about making your website as search friendly as possible. One of the basic methods of making your website search friendly is to always provide the search engines with an important, contextual clue as to the topic of the linked page. This is where the importance of breadcrumbs comes in. The term "breadcrumb" is taken from the trail of breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel in the popular fairytale.

What are breadcrumbs? Breadcrumbs are navigational links that appear below the page header. They are paths that let a user to orient within the website. These links provide a single hierarchical path even though there may be more than one path to access a webpage. Good SEO practices must choose the most frequently used route, or the route with the most appropriate context. They do not necessarily have to follow the directory structure.

There are three types of web breadcrumbs. These are,

  • Path breadcrumbs that are dynamic and show the path that the user has taken to reach a page.
  • Location breadcrumbs that are static pages located in the website hierarchy.
  • Attribute breadcrumbs that give information that categorizes the current page.

Here are some tips for effective navigation and optimization of website:
  • Incorporate breadcrumbs into online catalogs
  • Checkout catalogs
  • Have keyword-rich anchor text
  • Limit the number of crumbs to 6 or fewer
  • Avoid use of abbreviations
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word
  • Use full title when it is short
  • Titles must be short
  • Do not follow a spider's path for the breadcrumb.
Outsource Strategies International (OSI) is a US based company that offers professional outsourcing services in SEO, SEM, PPC advertising and more for clients in the US and world wide.

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posted by Outsource Strategies International @ 11:47 PM