If you’re a blogger you’re probably familiar with the term “breadcrumbs”.
In a nutshell, breadcrumbs are navigable paths from a blog’s home page to the page that’s currently displayed in the browser.
Every portion of the breadcrumb path except for the post/page name itself can be clicked on to jump immediately to that section of the blog.
For example, if you look at the top of this page you’ll see the following breadcrumb situated between the bottom menu bar and the post title:
You are here: / / Why you should enable ‘Breadcrumbs’ on your blog
As you can see, the words Home and Blogging Tips are both clickable links.
Clicking on Home would take you to the blog’s home page while clicking on Blogging Tips would take you to the “Blogging Tips” category where you’d find a list of all the posts that have been published in that category.
Having breadcrumbs displayed on your own blog would benefit you in two ways:
1 – Your blog’s visitors will always know exactly where they are on your blog regardless of how they arrived at the current page.
That makes it easy for any visitor to quickly jump to the home page or check out the other posts in the current category.
2 – The search engines love breadcrumbs because they help their bots more efficiently “crawl” the posts and pages of your blog and properly “index” their URLs in their search database.
That’s important because the more of your blog’s posts and pages are included in each search engine’s database the more search traffic your blog will receive.
Breadcrumbs also help the search engines determine the overall category of each post even if there is nothing else on the page that indicates a relationship with the category.
For example, since this post’s breadcrumb indicates that the post is filed in the “Blogging Tips” category, Google and the other search engines will know the post is a blogging tip.
That means this post is more likely to show up in a search for the term “Blogging Tips” than it would if the breadcrumb wasn’t present. And that could result in a little extra search traffic to the post.
Now that you know why breadcrumbs are important for your blog, let’s talk about ways to get them displayed on there!
Note: The information below applies to enabling breadcrumbs on a WordPress blog. If your blog works on a different platform you’ll need to check with its documentation for more info and instructions.
Basically, there are two simple ways to enable breadcrumbs on your blog:
1 – Your blog’s theme might have a setting that you can change to enable breadcrumbs.
For example, since I use the awesome Genesis theme framework all I had to do was log into my WordPress Dashboard and click Genesis>Theme Settings>Breadcrumbs.
From there I simply enabled breadcrumbs on the pages I wanted them to be displayed on.
2 – If your blog’s theme doesn’t have a setting to easily enable breadcrumbs you can also do it using a plugin. If you need to go this route I recommend using the fantastic Yoast SEO plugin.
Once you have the plugin installed you’ll find a great tutorial on breadcrumbs and instructions for enabling them on this page.
By the way, the Yoast SEO plugin does a LOT more than just allow you to enable breadcrumbs on your blog.
Its many features and SEO benefits are far too many to mention here, but suffice it to say, if you have a WordPress blog you NEED to have this fantastic plugin installed on it! Just sayin’.
So there you have it. You now know what breadcrumbs are and why they are so important to your blog’s visitors and the search engines. And you also know how to enable them.
Best of luck to you, and happy blogging!