Things I Love About Wizzley: Breadcrumbs And Contents

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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?

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

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.

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. 

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.