Do you use breadcrumbs for SEO? If you have a Wordpress website, or any website for that matter, you should organize your content using breadcrumbs.
Okay, So What Are Breadcrumbs?
ActiveRain uses breadcrumbs brilliantly. It's one of the many reasons that ActiveRain does so well in the search engine. (Great content from a lot of great people is the second reason.) I'm looking at breadcrumbs at the top of this post as I write this.
These are breadcrumbs:
It's a way of organizing content, for your users and for Google. Right at the top of every page, you'll see that the ActiveRain home page is the first, then, from the home page, we are in the Phoenix SEO Consultant's page (my info page), and one level deeper, we are in my blog. Even further- because I am in edit mode- we can see that we are in the Blog Admin page and even deeper than that, I am editing a blog post.
SEO people used to frown on breadcrumbs. Including me. It was believed that the "deeper" you went into a site, the less important the pages became. It is a known fact that Google PageRank drops for every level deep that you go into a website. For example:
ActiveRain.com has a Google PageRank of 5.
ActiveRain.com/bloghome has a Google PR of 4.
ActiveRain.com/blogs/ladystager16 has a PR of 3.
You can check your pagerank with the tool here (but I don't think it matters; keep reading).
So for the longest time, SEO's preached to keep everything as close to the "root" domain as possible. In other words, every page on your website should be no deeper than http://yourdomain.com/seo-guru/ because the deeper you went, the less page rank you had. Therefore, who needs breadcrumbs?
Well, because so many people have used bad linking techniques for so long, Pagerank does not matter as much anymore. The "depth" of your site has become less important. Some people say Google PageRank doesn't matter at all. (PagePage rank is based on the number of people that link to you.)
Google wants your content to be organized. It only makes sense. In the video below, I'll show you how to install breadcrumbs into your Wordpress blog and how to properly nest categories to optimize your web site for Google.
IMPORTANT: In this video, at the end, I make mention of changing your "category" base in Wordpress. If you understand how to do a 301 redirect, you will probably want to do that.. If you don't know how to write a 301 redirect, then ignore that part of the video (changing "category" to "real-estate") and I'll write a post tomorrow about redirecting your pages, so that you have no dead links.
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