What is breadcrumb navigation?

Breadcrumb navigation is a way of showing the path a visitor has taken through a website.  Each page that is visited is shown as a text link.  The breadcrumb “trail” is commonly shown at or near the top of the page.  See Midkent.ac.uk as an example.

Just below the main horizontal navigation bar the breadcrumb trail shows the visitor has viewed three pages: Home, About Us and Medway Campus.  Each one of these can be a text link, allowing the visitor to retrace their steps.

Why has breadcrumb navigation just become even more important?

Including a breadcrumb trail has always been seen as a value added function.  Good for usability and simpler navigation purposes.  Both are true.  But breadcrumb navigation just got a whole lot more important to every company website who understands the importance of ticking every box specific to how Google eventually ranks your website.

Google is to place importance on breadcrumb navigation

Google has decided it is going to change the way they display search engine results.  To make search result links more user friendly they are going to list the name of the actual page you are about to click to view.

So, instead of the MidKent College page example we used earlier being listed as: http://www.midkent.ac.uk/about-us/new-medway-campus it is now going to be shown using the breadcrumb trail navigation: midkent.ac.uk/ About Us > Medway Campus.

Not only is the link itself more user friendly and simple to read, Google are about to reward websites that employ breadcrumb navigation, too.

So if your business website doesn’t already use a breadcrumb trail to help your website visitors, contact Buzzin Fly now on 01634 322 721 and let us help you gain valuable search engine ranking over your competitors.