WordPress Optional Excerpt - Too Good to Overlook
It’s come to my attention since I wrote my post On Page SEO for WordPress that I left out a pretty important part of that recipe for blogging nirvana. On the WP post edit page there is a field labeled “Optional Excerpt” which I simply overlooked. Sorry about that, but I’m still learning myself.
The post excerpt substitutes on the category and archive pages for a snippet that WordPress will otherwise automatically grab from the first part of your post. There are three great reasons (that I know of) why you should use this feature:
- The Optional Excerpt will prevent the category and archive pages from containing duplicates of the main content.
- Content pages will be filled with keyword rich teasers to lure readers to the main content instead of vague truncated snippets.
- Category pages will be highly optimized content for keywords related to the category, and the search engines should love them.
Use the WP Optional excerpt feature and your category pages go directly from being a possible duplicate content liability to a keyword rich unique content asset. That’s a lot of SEO goodness for one or two lines of copy.
Tips:
- Don’t just copy and paste a snippet from your post or you’ll defeat the whole purpose.
- Try to write an interesting hook for the excerpt to draw the reader to the post - just like the meta description tag does in the SERP (define).
- Put your targeted key phrase in there, and also try to target the theme of the category page.
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Do you see a big upside to using excerpts over using full posts? I know that you will get more cliks if you use them but I think that you are asking the readers to take a step they do not need. Am I missing the point?
Topher
Do you see a big upside to using excerpts over using full posts?
I think so. We know that lots of targeted relevant content is good, and that duplicate content is bad. If you don’t use excerpts then your category pages will be nothing but duplicates of the first few lines of your posts - and you’ll probably want to nofollow them. If you write unique excerpts then your category pages will be extremely targeted unique content, that also have plenty of internal links pointing to them.
If you see a flaw with this line of reasoning I’d be happy to hear it. And thanks for the input by the way.
If I understand you right you are saying that by writing (and not just using a part of the original post) then you will have a a set of targeted keywords and more links going to them?
This I understand. with this you can drive more traffic to your site and get more people to click on the post.
My question then becomes what is the best way to server the readers. A page full of long full post, or a page with just excerpts that they then need to click on if they want to read the rest of the post?
See what I am saying?
Topher
@ Topher - I do see what you are saying, but even if you don’t use excerpts the category pages still won’t have your full posts on them. Rather only the first few lines of them which will be duplicate content, and may not really even be a good summary of what the post is about. Either way you will have to click through to read the rest of the post.
So really, if you do a good job on the excerpts usability should be better.
I think it’s a win/win situation.
Surely the fact that wordpress was coded using dreamweaver and has a mixture of inline PHP, XML, JavaScript, HTML, CSS .. j ust makes you want to puke.
People who do develop plugins, addons and modules for wordpress must have incredible patitence to be able to sit down and deal with the code rather than simlpy rewriting wordpress.
Chloe - “Surely the fact that wordpress was coded using dreamweaver and has a mixture of inline PHP, XML, JavaScript, HTML, CSS .. j ust makes you want to puke.”
Not so that I would notice, but then I’m not a programmer. To me the beauty of WP is that you don’t need to be a programmer to use it, and it works.
Hi David
Your right, i use wordpress myself and its ease of use is great, my quarms are only related to the programming side of wordpress. This is also why wordpress dies under ‘the digg effect’.
I’ve seen some wordpress pages reporting 31 queries per page load..