Things I Love About Wizzley: Breadcrumbs And Contents

by humagaia

Breadcrumbs are useful on their own. Custom contents are useful in each article. Put them together & S.E bots know exactly what you are writing about. Do it!...

There are many things I love about Wizzley.

In fact, I have written a series about the many little gems which are available on Wizzley.

Breadcrumbs And Contents are two more that, on their own, are precious.

But combine them and you have the makings of cold fusion.

There is more energy coming out than there had been put in.

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Stimulating our senses

You may think me mad, crazy, loopy, a bit dull in the head, and you wouldn't be far wrong. 'The things I love about Wizzley': breadcrumbs and contents? What on earth have sandwiches got to do with Wizzley functions and modules? Well you would be surprised how much the sandwiching of breadcrumbs and contents affects your capability to attract visitors.

Breadcrumbs and content
Breadcrumbs and content

Sure, a picture of a sandwich always attracts. Well it does me, anyway. And I am the important one here, with my 'searcher' hat on. What is it about a well-crafted sandwich that so fulfils our minds-eye and our hypothalamus?

Hypothalamus Wiki

The hypothalamus is a portion of the brain that contains a number of small nuclei with a variety of functions. One of the most important functions of the hypothalamus is to link the nervous system to the endocrine system via the ...

Picking up the Breadcrumbs

Useful for all searchers

We tuck into our sandwich and inevitably we drop a few breadcrumbs along the way.

If we have been eating on the go, as so many of us seem to have to do in order to complete all the tasks expected of us these days, then no doubt we have left a trail from whence we came, to where we are now.

Breadcrumbs - Usage

Picking up the breadcrumbs
Picking up the breadcrumbs
Pixabay

And so it is for the websites that offer a breadcrumb trail, such a Wizzley.

Our navigation from whence we enter the site, to where we are at present, is logged and played back to us in a neat little package called a, you guessed it, 'breadcrumb'.

A breadcrumb is that line of categories before the title of your article, as double underlined, and pointed to, in the screenshot below.

A visitor may have arrived at your page, but now they have the route they would have taken, if they had started at 'Start'.

Breadcrumb trail on website
Breadcrumb trail on website
Humagaia "Paint" screenshot

Breadcrumb (navigation) Wiki

:"Breadcrumb trail" redirects here. For the album by The Frames, see Breadcrumb Trail. Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trail is a navigation aid used in user interfaces. It allows users to keep track of their locations within programs or ...

How breadcrumbs help the visitor

This trail, the breadcrumb trail, allows a visitor, once they have read your page of course, to navigate easily through to any of the categories that are displayed in the breadcrumb trail. In the case above:

Start > Topics > Wizzley Tips & Community > Wizzley Modules

they are given the opportunity to find more articles within any of the categories that you decided your page best fitted. It is a navigational aid. 

Breadcrumbs - where next?

Breadcrumb trail - where next?
Breadcrumb trail - where next?

Don't worry, they are only likely to take this option if they have not found anything in 'New pages by.......'.

How breadcrumbs help the website

Wizzley in this case

It is likely that one of the criteria that keeps you writing at Wizzley is that they pay attention to SEO. That is, all your articles are converted to optimized HTML, once you create the copy and add in all the modules you require. You are grateful that you do not have to worry about this. I am too.

Well the breadcrumb trail is a little bit of SEO for the site. It has an impact on the likeability factor that Google employs in its search algorithms.

Google love

Google love for breadcrumbs
Google love for breadcrumbs

How breadcrumbs help search spiders, bots & indexes.

A breadcrumb trail is a mechanism by which, as well as sitemaps, a search 'spider' or 'bot' can navigate successfully through a website. The easier it is to navigate, the more likely all of the site will be trawled for content, and the more likely that all pages will be found.

Your pages will be found and indexed as a direct result, together with other mechanisms employed by Wizzley, of the breadcrumb trail being present.

Another factor to consider is how the breadcrumb assists search algorithms to determine what your page is about. Standalone my page could look as if it is about bread 'breadcrumbs', as I have confused the issue by introducing, and linking to, content that is about the foodstuff. But the breadcrumb trail tells the search index and algorithm that it is better categorized under 'navigational breadcrumb' within an internet related subject area.

Breadcrumbs assist indexing
Breadcrumbs assist indexing

It is therefore imperative that you include your pages in the most appropriate category, sub-category hierarchy, before you publish, so that you give as much information to the search engine about the relevance that page has to a particular meaning of the keywords you are utilizing.

This breadcrumb function allows for alternative word meaning in your page to be refined to the actual meaning you had in mind.

It tells the search algorithms exactly what they need to know: where to place your page URL in their search indexes.

How breadcrumbs help searchers.

Some time ago Google introduced an alternative indication of a page URL link route. Thy started to show breadcrumb trails rather than the tradition full extension of a webpage URL. This gives a searcher a better indication of the category into which the web page sits and therefore tells them whether it is likely to offer the sort of information for which they may be looking.

This only occurs where a website offers breadcrumb trails, and they implement it in such a way, in the SEO HTML for a search bot to be able to know that it is a breadcrumb that it has found. I am not sure if Wizzley wished their breadcrumbs to appear in the serps for a web page. 

As you can see in the screenshot opposite, #1 BBC does not, #2 Amazon does. At present no Wizzley breadcrumbs appear in Google serps, so I can only assume that they don't want them to appear for some reason, 

Breadcrumbs shown in Google SERPs
Breadcrumbs shown in Google SERPs
Humagaia "Paint" screenshot

or that they have not implemented the breadcrumb HTML with the proper DIV code for it to be picked up by googlebot.

What I Love About Wizzley: Breadcrumbs

The reason I love Wizzley so much is that they have implemented so many useful little SEO tricks of the trade and that those little additions make so much difference to the way my articles are viewed by search engines, such that they have the optimum chance of ranking well for the search terms that I want them to.

Standalone, breadcrumbs are efficient, but combined with 'Contents', the sum of the parts exceeds the addition of the two individual components.

Sum of the parts > addition of components
Sum of the parts > addition of compon...

What I Love About Wizzley: Contents

There are two 'Contents' within Wizzley. There is the 'Topics on Wizzley' where the hierarchy of the site is displayed. This, from an SEO perspective makes Wizzley eminently trawlable by search engine bots, such that all pages are able to be found easily.

That is essential for any site that wants to have their pages ranked well within search engine results pages. It is a flag which Google analyzes, that adds to the credibility, read rank, of a website.

Wizzley Topic contents page

Wizzley Topics
Wizzley Topics

Although I love that Wizzley does it this way, this is not my true 'contents' love. I love the 'contents' module available to me when I create my pages. And I will tell you a little story, as is my wont.

Creating a contents section by hand

When I was writing at Hubpages, as now on Wizzley, I tended to write quite lengthy Hubs. This led me to the conclusion that I should make life a little easier for visitors by creating a contents at the beginning of any long Hub. There was no facility to achieve this with a module such as that at Wizzley.

Contents (by hand)
Contents (by hand)

It was tedious in the extreme to achieve.

It was a painful experience each time to hand craft a contents section and very time-consuming.

I gave up after a few goes.

It was not worth the effort. Well it was worth the effort in SEO terms, but not for my mental well-being.

And then I found Wizzley, and what did they have sitting on a shelf, waiting for me to pick it up and cuddle it? A contents module!

Oh joy! Oh bountiful ecstasy! Joy of Joys! 

Why a contents module is so useful

But why am I so ebullient about a mere contents module?

  1. It saves me all that grief and heartache trying to create one myself, by hand.
  2. It can be kept up to date easily, if or when I add new modules.
  3. I can determine, easily, the module titles I want to include or exclude from the contents list.
  4. It assists my readership to navigate to the section they are most interested in, rather than read through all the drivel.
  5. It assists me when I want to get to a section to update it.
  6. I can use it to see if the module titles are consistent and that my page flows well from the head (introduction), through the body of the article, to the tail (conclusion).
  7. It gives my audience a flavor of what they can expect with the page.
  8. If I place a contents section at the end of a long article, it gives the reader a chance to return quickly and easily to a section they may want to re-read.

But most of all, and the reason I love the 'contents' module so much, it gives me an opportunity to condense the page into a set of 'hooks' for the search bots.

I can go fishing to hook the big fish Google.

It gives me the chance to inform those bots exactly what the page contains, and is all about.

How important is this?  

Think back to the efficacy I place on the 'breadcrumb trail' and how important that is to the user experience and the SEO making life easier for the search bots. 

Hooking the big fish Google
Hooking the big fish Google

The breadcrumbs tell the bots about external factors that categorize my pages. Contents reinforce the message by telling the bots the internal factors they should take note of when determining what my pages are all about.

This dual functioning ensures that my page is not mistakenly placed in an inappropriate position within the search engine indexes. 

You may scoff or laugh, but you would be surprised (maybe not) how often an excellent article is misplaced, never to be seen for the keywords for which it was intended.

All that hard work developing your masterpiece, only for it to be housed in the cavernous dungeons of a search engines index, never to see the light of day again.

What a waste the contents module can alleviate.

Cavernous dungeon for misplaced articles
Cavernous dungeon for misplaced articles

Conclusion

What I love about Wizzley: Breadcrumbs & Contents, Together

I think you will see that each on their own, the breadcrumb trail and the contents module, are excellent SEO techniques that should be loved. But together the marriage is blissful.

You have no choice about using the breadcrumb trail, except that you should contemplate carefully  which category and sub-category you select for your articles. See it from an audience perspective, for that is equally the perspective that a search engine bot will see.

You do have a choice with the contents module. For the reasoning that I have given above, you should seriously consider including one in your articles, especially if they are of any length and contain a number of section headings, that would better inform both your human audience and your search engine audience, what it's all about.

Updated: 02/05/2021, humagaia
 
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humagaia on 04/28/2012

Thank you David. I hope it has a positive impact on your articles being indexed, and properly.

DavidPaulWagner on 04/27/2012

Some great advice on how to improve our Wizzley articles' SEO. Thanks, humagaia!

humagaia on 02/29/2012

@N_R I did not read Darkside's hub. I am not writing at HP at the moment - too busy here and on my own websites. But I shall keep it in mind. Thanks.
The ed pres thing sounds like a tough gig. Good luck with that one.
See you in April!

NaturalRemedies on 02/29/2012

Yes, I totally love the Contents capsule. Did you find darkside's hub? It's called Table of Contents.

I'll hold my verdict overall until I can write more at Wizzley, probably not until April. I have an 8 hour continuing education presentation on shoulders to write and deliver in 3 weeks. That will have me tied up until then.

humagaia on 02/29/2012

@N_R - it took me a little while to figure out the #link_jump for myself (I wish someone had pointed out Darkside's instructions). It was so tedious to construct, and boring. Eventually I only used it to allow readers to #jump back to the beginning, at the end of my hubs.
Isn't it great that the contents module is available on Wizzley - no more pratting about creating and amending 'contents'?
I'll be using the contents module in almost all my Wizer's.
Wizzley is so much wizer (sic.), and more user-friendly, than HP.

NaturalRemedies on 02/28/2012

I just listed the contents, usually food and recipe stuff. Someone pointed me to something (by darkside I believe) to do the link jump. At the time I was such a novice, that I was intimidated to pursue it. Then I guess I forgot about it. I don't know how to do it, but probably could follow instructions now. It would probably be really helpful on my food and recipe hubs.

humagaia on 02/28/2012

@N_R Did you manage to make it with links to the appropriate headings so the visitor could jump there, or were the contents just a list of module titles?

NaturalRemedies on 02/28/2012

I also often create a "contents" list near the beginning of many of my hubs, therefore I love the "Contents" module.

humagaia on 02/27/2012

Since the contents are made up of the module headings most of my keyword phrases are in the contents. They are then taken by the search indexing bots as being 'extra relevant' because they are near the beginning of the article, and if I add a contents at the bottom also, the keywords are at the end of the article, as well. This too makes good sense from an SEO point of view.
All in all contents and breadcrumbs are very important to all of us.
Thanks for your comments TTB.

top10best on 02/27/2012

Excellent article. Well written and explained. I started using contents on Squidoo and if you ever look at on-page Analytics, it's amazing how often they are used by readers.

I try to ensure I have a few search keyword phrases in them too. I never write an article without them if it is somewhat automatic in a module like here or Squidoo.

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