Thursday, November 5, 2009

Breadcrumbing for SEO - Getting your Pages Indexed Properly Via On-Page Links

Sitemaps are one way of getting search engines to understand your site and all the pages you have, but they're not always totally effective, especially as your site grows (in number of pages) and those sitemap files start getting larger, and large.

One way to "show" search engines all the pages on your site as well as to tell them what those pages are about (playing into their relevance for targeted keywords), is by using a practice commonly referred to as breadcrumbing.

Breadcrumbing refers to leading the search engine throughout your site by making it follow specific paths you set up through links between pages. Ensuring that every page on your site is linked to from somewhere is a key component to making sure search engines know that page exists and can index it properly. Not only that, but as you lay breadcrumbs for the search engine to follow, you can use the anchor text in the links (the text that is underlined and links to the other page) to tell the search engine what the destination page is about (giving it context/relevancy).

Breadcrumbing could be done fairly 'dumbly' by simply including a couple of links from every page to the next couple pieces of content in some sort of sequential order. Perhaps by showing a "Next Article" or "Next Products" link(s) at the bottom of the current page. You can also leverage breadcrumbing to improve user navigability of your site. If the links are done in a logical manner that helps the user discover related content, that helps both SEO and navigation. For example "Related Articles" or "Similar Products." To ensure you're linking to all the pages (rather than your algorithm inadvertently leaving out certain pages from the link structure), you may want to inter-mix some kind of relevant linking with some sequential linking. Perhaps a "Next Article" link coupled with a "Related Articles" link.

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