Posts in category WordPress tips

WordPress Tip: Add Breadcrumbs For Better Navigation



WordPress is one of the most popular blog software packages in use today yet despite all the work that has gone into writing the software, there are still some basic flaws in the package.

One of those flaws is the lack navigation breadcrumbs. These breadcrumbs have several benefits to your blog including user navigation, search engine navigation (which helps your SEO) and a general professional look.

Breadcrumbs are the navigation text you often see on some blogs. A good breadcrumb addition will show a complete navigation structure from your categories. For example, the top of the post could show Home > SEO > WordPress SEO indicating the post is in the category for SEO and subcategory WordPress SEO.

If the breadcrumb utility is well written, each component will be ‘clickable’, in other words, a link through to the previous section. There are several plugins available that place breadcrumbs on your single pages (don’t use them on your front page). One plugin that works quite well comes from Yoast and is well worth checking out. A search of WordPress’s plugins will uncover more.

A breadcrumb plugin makes life a little easier on your visitors and may even help keep your visitor a little longer as they click on category link to check other posts. This is one plugin which will not hurt your blog at all, it may actually help.

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WordPress Tip – Make Use Of Your Footer



Your footer is the perfect place to put your internal links to pages that may be of value to your readers, but are not part of your blogs main direction.

These links could include privacy statements, disclosures, sitemaps and perhaps you’re about me pages. Why in the footer? Your blog has a reason for being. It may be a business blog that is promoting the products or services. It may be an information blog or could just be a personal blog detailing your day to day life. What you don’t want is to divert attention away from your blogs content.

With the exception of the ‘about me’ page, the other pages are really just polite policy pages. If people care, they will visit and read them. Generally speaking, these pages receive the lowest volumes of traffic, and that should be the way you want it. Your ‘about me’ page is a little different and may be a page that you want people to visit frequently. If so, place it higher on the page.

There are several ways to use the footer, the easiest being to use the theme editor. Rather than playing with PHP and trying to code the links from the database, use a direct link in HTML. This can be done by using the standard a href= code. To separate the links, just place the “|” symbol between each one. It looks cleaner and may just clean up some the clutter from your sidebars.

Using the footer to publish this information has been fairly standard for many years on web sites. As you tour around visiting blogs, check out where they publish the links. Many are now turning to the least used space on their blog, the footer.

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