The use of bread crumbs is one of the SEO strategies that helps to improve the positioning of sites with many sections and hierarchical levels of information such as blogs and e-commerce stores. In order to optimize the user experience and ensure a good Google positioning, it is necessary that the website structure is well organized and based on the relevant keyword categories and subcategories with high search volume.
A website without the proper strategic navigation planning frustrates the user, making their experience confusing. As attractive and innovative as the product or service offered in the digital environment may be, both Google and the user will not be able to find them easily, and this implies in loss of revenue, high rejection rates and other problems.
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So, you need to understand the importance of using breadcrumbs intelligently and how valuable the tactic is to the user experience.
What are bread crumbs?
Bread crumbs or breadcrumbs are nothing more than a site navigation scheme, based on content structuring. It is able to indicate in a simplified way to visitors where they are in a website’s page hierarchy. The breadcrumb feature of an e-commerce store is positioned at the top of the product pages and according to its categories.
Origin of the term
A term widely known in the Design and Front-End of virtual stores, breadcrumb is a resource whose objective is to provide the best and simplest usability to its visitors.
The “bread crumbs” refer to the fable of John and Mary of the Brothers Grimm. Like children in the fairy tale, bread crumbs offer users a way to trace the “way back” to their point of origin. Crumbs are text links segmented horizontally and separated by the “greater than” symbol (>), indicating the level of that page in relation to the links on the neighboring page.
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What are the types of breadcrumbs?
Breadcrumbs consist of three factors for categorizing information:
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Location
Location-based breadcrumbs statically show the user where they are in the site hierarchy. They are used for navigation structures with more than two levels. This breadcrumb is independent of the navigation performed by the user and basically answers questions such as: where is what I am looking for on this website?
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Attribute
The navigation trails based on attributes show the user and search engines the properties of items displayed on a specific page, providing meta-information for each of the content found.
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Path
Bread crumbs that consider the user’s path dynamically display the pages visited before reaching the source page. This type of trail is similar to the location-based trail, but with different functionality.
What are the benefits of bread crumbs?
- Optimizes the user experience
- Reduces friction in navigation by decreasing clicks or actions to return to top-level pages
- Ensures that search engines understand the structure of a website and find all pages that should be crawled
- Improves CTR ( Click Through Rate )
- Do not take up much space on the page
5 good practices in implementing bread crumbs
Do not replace page menus with breadcrumbs
Breadcrumb navigation is a plus, so it should not replace effective primary navigation menus. This is a secondary navigation feature, which allows users to establish where they are.
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Do not include links to the page visited
Indicating to the user where he is with a link is not advisable, because when clicking the user will be redirected to the same place.
Use tabs
Use symbols to separate one category from another on a track. The best known is the “greater than” (>), however, bars, arrows and others can also be used.
Be careful with the size and spacing of bread crumbs
When formatting the website’s navigation trails, it is necessary to consider the size and spacing between text and symbol, so you do not compromise the identification and legibility of the content.
Avoid flashy fonts and colors
As we already mentioned, bread crumbs fulfill the role of secondary navigation, so avoid the use of strong colors and flashy fonts, otherwise the feature will highlight the look of the website, taking away from the content and products.
Did you see how bread crumbs is a simple technique, but valuable for the user experience? Share your experiences or questions with us in the comments!
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