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What is a page excerpt?

As you must have seen in many blogs, the archives and categories are displayed as excepts or short previews. Some SEO gurus claim that post excerpts are excellent for your page views and Alexa rankings because the double the number of clicks you are getting.

Wordpress blogs have front pages which displays blog entries. They to can be excerpts although most bloggers choose to use full posts. Supposing your front page does use full posts, your archives and categories would be redundant. For this reason using excerpts has become common practice.

How Do I use Excerpts

(MODIFYING THE TEMPLATE)

Pages such as your Index, Archives and Category contain a line of code which includes: the_content

To change that to an excerpt simply substitute “the_content” for “the_excerpt”, with out quotes of coarse.

Remember, if you want your index, or main page to have full posts, make sure to use “the_content”.

(WITHIN THE POSTS THEMSELVES)

Supposing you do not want to modify your template and you only want certain posts to be excerpts, you can do that when you are writing a new blog entry.

Within WordPress 2.5 if you scroll down a little, you will see, “Advanced Options” and right under a box to paste your excerpt in. Click publish and that’s it. If you do use this way you must know that the excerpt will also be an excerpt in your front page.

My favorite way of getting an excerpt is the simplest in my opinion. I simply insert the more tag. You place it where you want the excerpt to end.

<!-more->

The more tag also affects your entries in your RSS feed. The proper way of getting excerpts depends on what you want to do exactly. Play around with the code please copy and paste to safe place a backup of the page you are playing with. Just in case…

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