Breadcrumbs and landing pages: tips for SEO

Use "Bread Crumbs" for site navigation

Keyword-rich internal links will assist your visits in determining exactly where they are on your site, at any given point of time. The technique of "bread crumbs" can be used to place these internal links in a highly visible place (such as at the top of the page). This can help for SEO rankings also, because these links are counted as internal links.

Example of Bread Crumb navigation

Video Games > PSP Games > Car race games

Use "NOFOLLOW" for outgoing text links

The rel="NOFOLLOW" attribute in an anchor tag is used to block search engines from traversing from beyond the current page to the given link. This attribute is being used in forums and blogs etc. so people who put in links to their sites have those links as "NOFOLLOW". This blocks the passing of PageRank to the target link. You can put the NOFOLLOW attribute in all your outgoing links so that your link worth does not get passed on the other sites you link to, from your websites.


Don’t have too many 404 errors on your site

If you are rearranging your website it is possible that you are moving pages here and there and renaming pages. This can lead to 404 errors not only for visitors but for Google also because Google thinks the existing pages have become vanished. By logging in to Google webmaster tools and adding your site, you can usually find information about 404 errors that Google has found on your site, using the Diagnostics tool. You want to put in transparent redirects like 301's for the old URLs found in the errors list to the corresponding new URLs you have that have the same content.


Check landing page effectiveness and conversion rates and make changes

If you are finding that visitors are hitting upon particular pages in your site, use a good web analytics tool to find where they came from, what keywords they used in search engine before they clicked through to your site, and how long they are staying on your site, and whether they are purchasing anything from your site. Google has a website optimization tool that you can use, to do A/B testing for different landing pages so you can find which type of landing pages work best for you.


Don’t use "Click here" as your anchor text

Some websites use the anchor text "Click here" for their internal and external links. This is not a good approach because you should be using relevant keywords in the anchor text of links so Google knows what the link is about and will reward and rank you accordingly.