These days companies across the globe are trying all kinds of tactics to get an edge on the competition in the world wide web. Search Engine Optimization competes with Marketing strategies for design features, code volume and screen space. Whether your goal is to drive more traffic to your website, or get customers to stick around longer and buy more stuff we've found a great way to satisfy that goal.
The answer is Web Crumbs. This is a throw back to your childhood and the story of Hansel and Gretel! No Joke! As you recall from this childhood tale, Hansel and Gretel leave behind bread crumbs as they venture into the forest so that they can find their way out, but they get detained by a hungry woman in a quaint gingerbread house. Well when it comes to the web we too want to leave breadcrumbs for the customer to find their way back where they came from. The solution is web Crumbs. These great little features can be utilized in several different ways, but I want to share with you how they will help both consumer and webmaster alike.
First... Why implement this on your website, and why did we implement them on ours? Here are a few reasons...
- Customers can find their way back to other pages with one click so that they can go on to purchase other products or find one that better suits their needs
- Browsing gets complex! When dealing with as few as 10 products, categories need to be introduced to make it easier for the customer to find what they are looking for, and web crumbs allow the user to navigate back and forth within these categories.
Its also great for search engines because...
- Search Engines can navigate your site and figure out what the category structure is more easily and therefore drive more customers and more importantly the right type of customers to your site.
- The most important category pages get the most links from other pages so your not watering down your highest ranked pages down with 10's, 100's or 1000's of product pages that have the exact same relevancy to search engines.
- Its easy (and important) to include keyword rich text in the links because they must be short and simple.
So what do web crumbs look like? There are several varieties, but here are the two most common...
Home -> Top Category -> Second Category -> Product
The Second Type generally has a more extensive listing of the site...
Matthew Ricci Gives these Recommendations for implementing web crumbs regardless of what method...
- Incorporate breadcrumbs into online catalogs
- Checkout catalogs
- Have keyword-rich anchor text
- Limit the number of crumbs to 6 or fewer (In the second example this would mean greater than 4 layers)
- Avoid use of abbreviations
- Capitalize the first letter of each word
- Use full title when it is short
- Titles must be short
Click below to see our websites new design and our...
- Implementation of Web Crumbs
- Mouse over Product information which keeps things easy to find, and details easily within reach
- Smaller Images with Short Description so you don't have too much to read to find what your looking for and can search for products at a glance!
