Google first introduced Rich Snippets in 2009. Idea is quite simple – you can add special markup to your website pages which is invisible to users, but will help search engines to understand what kind of information is published on the page and this is also displayed on their search page. And of course, better their system knows what your website has to offer, better search results it will generate. While some of the snippets are quite specific like reviews and recipes, there is one very important which affects every website. It’s breadcrumbs.

Breadcrumbs is additional navigation which is showing user “You are here” and allowing them to go up one or more levels. For example,

Home > Web Development Blog > SEO > Tip #1

If your site doesn’t have breadcrumbs navigation, it may be good idea to have one added. It’s good for site usability, makes it easier for users to tell where they are and get to the other relevant content of your site (so they stick longer). It’s also good for search engines – when you have breadcrumbs you actually increasing importance of the pages which appear on higher levels of breadcrumbs navigation. And now you can actually point rich snippet to your breadcrumb navigation. This will sure help search engine to figure out the structure of your website and also Google starts displaying breadcrumb path to the page instead of showing URL of the page in the search results. So, when users see your entry in the search, they will have better idea what your page is about (assuming your navigation is well structured).

To implement rich snippet for breadcrumbs you need to add a few extra tags and properties to your navigation, which is really easy to do, especially if you are using some content management system like WordPress.

Here is the article from Google’s Webmasters Blog on Breadcrumbs Rich Snippets where they explain how to add those to your website. Of course, we can help you with implementation, just give us a call.