Speaker 1: 0:52

Hi, ed Dawson here, and, as I'm a bit busy at the moment and need a break, welcome to another one of my best of SEO is not that hard podcasts. These are the episodes from the back catalog that I think have the greatest hits and ones that are still relevant and provide great value for you. So, without further ado, let's get into the episode. Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of KeywordsPeopleUsecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hi, this is episode 86 of SEO is not that hard, and today I'm going to be talking about breadcrumbs. Now, the reason I've chosen breadcrumbs today is because, obviously, at the moment time of recording in March 2024, we've got the big Google spam and core updates that have been running, and there's lots of people out there on Twitter and other places sharing their sites that have been hit by these core updates and also by the helpful content update back in previous times and I've started to notice a sort of correlation that I'm seeing that lots of these websites don't have breadcrumbs on them them. Now, if you're not familiar with what breadcrumbs are, these are a navigational device that many websites use and they're called breadcrumbs because it goes back to the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel where Hansel and Gretel, as they're going through the woods, leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind them so that they can follow those breadcrumbs back to get out of the forest, to sort of trace their journey back. And it's similar on a website where these breadcrumbs are a navigation piece that will appear, usually in your header, somewhere normally between the header and the main content, and you'll see a little link that might say Home, then say you're a website selling I don't know, say um sports shoes. You might then have home and the next part of your category would be men, for men's sports shoes. And then you might have on a page where it was for um football shoes, you had who would have football um as part of the navigation, and then you would have say if you were in the nike um, like night football shoes, then you would have say if you were in the Nike football shoes, then you might have the Nike as the next link. So these links build up as you navigate through the hierarchy of a site and it means you can quickly see where you are on a site and you can quickly navigate up and down the hierarchy back to where you came from. So if you're looking at Nike football boots, then if you want to look at other brands, you can just go to the breadcrumb and click the football link and then you'd be on a category page which would have links to all the other providers uh, providers, sellers of those football boots so you'll have seen these. So hopefully I mean hopefully my description, uh is working for you, can you? You'll have seen these, so hopefully my description is working for you. You will remember seeing these on other sites.

Speaker 1: 4:03

Now, why am I so keen on breadcrumbs? Well, it's for a few reasons. They're actually great for usability, so they're really good for your users. They're really helpful for your users to be able to find out where they are on a site, understand where they are and then to navigate around where they are. They're actually really, really helpful for people. Secondly, they're really good for SEO because they give clear internal linking and structure between related pages. So it's a fantastic common sense way of linking related pages and it helps identify cluster pages. So, going back to the example of sports shoes, you are going to be linking in from men into football shoes, so then that's giving a clear categorization of all the boots that come under that and then you link from those to all the different types of, say, manufacturers, or you might have other types of football classification pages that you can put underneath that. So it works really well for internal linking and is easy to replicate across a site. So really good for SEO in those terms.

Speaker 1: 5:17

It's also good for SEO because, as well as the actual links, you can also put in breadcrumb schema. You can add schema markup to your web page. It actually explains to Google how all these breadcrumbs schema you can add schema markup to your web page actually explains to google how all these breadcrumbs fit together and the various attributes of the breadcrumbs, and google will then use those in the search engine results pages and will actually use your breadcrumbs as part of the information it gives when it's shown those pages. So rather than just giving a straight URL, it can actually put the breadcrumbs in there, so even people going on the search engine result pages can see the hierarchy of your page, understand the page and they just look better on the search engine result pages. And obviously, as well as using the anchor text for internal linking, using the schema markup also helps Google understand the structure of your site. So they're actually really simple to implement.

Speaker 1: 6:13

And because they're so simple implement implement it surprises me how many people don't actually put them on the sites. Especially some of these sites have been hit by the hcu, where they've got lots of pages and you can kind of see they're trying to put a structure on the sites. But this because this piece is a very clear indicator to google of what your structure is and a really helpful thing for your users for them to navigate about. It's just been completely missed out. And there are so many um plugins for um. All cms's like wordpress has so many plugin options to get um these breadcrumbs just done for you without really have to think about it.

Speaker 1: 6:49

If you're coding a site from scratch, it's not a difficult thing to implement and it's that's what surprises me that more people don't do this and it's something I would. I put on all my sites and would recommend everybody puts on their sites these breadcrumbs because it just helps in so many ways. It helps people, it helps google. I just can't see a reason for not doing it and, as I say, I've seen it correlate with plenty of sites hit by the hcu that don't have breadcrumbs. Now I don't think they've been just hit because they haven't got breadcrumbs, but I think with all these hcu and all these core updates, all these algorithms, there's a combination of things and I just implore anybody who isn't using breadcrumbs to seriously look into how to add it onto your site and whether you should add it onto your site, because I just don't see any negative side in actually implementing breadcrumbs.

Speaker 1: 7:42

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that Keywords People use, that you can book a free, no obligation, one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeoplesusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

Speaker 1: 8:21

Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywords people usecom to get an instant hit of more seo tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick seo tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel five on twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywords people usecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of seo is not that hard.