SEO and breadcrumb navigation.

[pldoolittle]

The conventional wisdom is that the H1 tags need to be a close to the top of the page as possible, followed immediately by the opening paragraph. But, breadcrumb nav pushes that down below several (perhaps a 1/2 dozen) links.

It that of significant concern as it relates to on page SEO? Given the mass of code that forms the left nav, do they even notice the breadcrumbs? Any commentary on breadcrumbs regarding SEO, visitor flow, etc is welcome. I presently have mine at page bottom, and I think it looks a bit silly.


Also, is anyone putting a "Continue Shopping/back" button on the basket page?

[rcmedia]

Honestly... it's debatable at best if things like breadcrumbs and H1 tags have any importance to the major search engines anymore.
The best SEO thing you can do for your Miva site is to render every page to static html with minimal page code (*using a module like Merchant Optimizer).
Then link all of your static prodcut html links to a sitemap.

[nhinternetsolutions]

Breadcrumb Navigations were originally designed for usability. Allowing your visitors to know where they were and how to get back to a previous level.

It can be helpful in SEO by allowing search bots to index pages and help with keyword density.

If you have a large site, I would recommend you implement breadcrumb navigation for simply the usability aspect. Do NOT implement it simply to try to get better rankings.

If you make the website easy to navigate, everything else will follow.


Steve

[pldoolittle]

Good comments about useability. I wan't thinking that BC nav would help SEO, but rather that it might hinder it.

[Brandon MUS]

A handful of links is not going to throw you off of the SERP, but it may keep your customers happier and browsing longer. 1000's of sites have a long list of navigational links before their content, and they still manage to do very well in the results. Having an extra 3-4 links will not effect your rankings.

[pldoolittle]

Brandon, I tend to agree. I just thought it would be worth putting up for discussion before I made any changes.

[Brandon MUS]

You're right, it's always best to think of the SE and usability repercussions before making changes like this.