Navigation is an extremely important topic for any good Charleston Web Design Company today. It has a much bigger effect on SEO than most people realize, but that effect is tricky to spot because it is largely “secondary.” Ease of navigation impacts factors like visitor stay time and bounce rate, both of which carry a lot of weight in Google’s current algorithm. Breadcrumb navigation, although simple and intuitive, could cause the biggest improvement in your website’s SEO in a long time.

Breadcrumbs Explained by Your Charleston Web Design Company

We all know the story of Hansel and Gretel and their flawed plan to leave breadcrumbs behind to mark their way home. Fortunately, breadcrumb navigation works better than that, as there are no hungry birds that swoop in to eat digital content. In short, breadcrumb navigation creates a visual, clickable path back through the website’s levels all the way to the home page. Just glance above the title of this blog post and you’ll see what we mean.

How Breadcrumbs Enrich Your Visitor Metrics

This navigation system gives your visitors an extremely convenient way to do a few different things:
• If a visitor arrives at a deep-level page on your site through a Google search, he can easily move up one level to see other pages on related topics.
• Likewise, the breadcrumb navigation provides “at a glance” a few other pages of your site that may be of interest to the visitor.
• If a visitor has mistakenly moved to the wrong page, breadcrumb navigation lets him immediately move back a level.

A tool like breadcrumb navigation that encourages visitors to visit more pages on your site and to stay longer is worth its weight in gold for SEO purposes. Google now looks very carefully at visitor stay time and the number of different pages a visitor navigates to during a single session as important factors for ranking your website in keyword searches. Contact us today to ask how our Charleston Web Design company can help you with this and other great SEO ideas.