Excerpts are a very important part of any blog. However, most bloggers do not know their exact purpose. Excerpts are also called summaries and serve two purposes—one assists the development of better SEO for your blog posts, and the other purpose assists the design of your blog and its user experience. You want readers to easily browse your blog and find what they are looking for. At the same time, you also want search engines to help potential readers find content on your blog.
Let’s look at both.
SEO: By using excerpts, you increase Google’s density of your blog post display, good for both SEO and good for acquiring more clicks into your content. Below are before/after Google search finds for one of our new blogs (we’ve been working with Ed on blog topics such as this). In the first search example is a typical blog post he made in Feb. as displayed by Google Search. The second is a similar blog post he made in Mar. after implementing excerpts into his blog post routine. Can you see just how much more space Google slots him with an excerpt? With the value of being able to handcraft these excerpts/summaries, can you also see how you’ll be able to garner more click-throughs from potential readers based on the tease of the content, not just the headline? You’ll get to know the absolute length that is best for any excerpt/summary and be well on your way toward better SEO.
Many bloggers may not know how to manually create their own blog post excerpts or are unaware that this is even a possibility in WordPress. It is an option for everyone and if you are not doing this, we highly encourage it.
Readers: Often times the lead (first few sentences of your post) may not necessarily fully reflect the content of the post or may not even make sense without the full post (depending on the blogger and his or her writing style).
When you write an excerpt for each post, you are summarizing for your readers what it is they're going to read about when they click on your link. This is also a great place to insert specific keywords for when Google is crawling sites; if your post is about Vanilla Reloads, credit cards, and CVS (which are all big search terms overall) you're able to make sure those words are all in the excerpt whereas if you let the excerpt just be pulled from the first few sentences, it might only have one of those three keywords or none at all based upon how far into your post you get into your topic.
Reference Material
Below is an excellent article on how and why you should be using excerpts.
Key takeaways from this article:
On your own website pages, on Facebook pages, and in a Google search result, the post excerpt backs up the title and is what ultimately will determine whether the reader takes action and clicks through.
That’s a very small amount of space in which to entice potential readers to click through and neither the introduction to the article nor an automated process is up to the task.
Automatic extracts are a purely arbitrary selection of the first so many words of your content (WordPress’ default is 55).
Excerpts are really a vital component of your content and get used in places that are not immediately obvious.
Resources
Here are three excerpt plugins for you to consider. The 'advanced' one is the one we like more but it has not been updated lately, though still seems to perform well with new WP updates. The other is newer and +/- better with more recent updates. And the third is the one mentioned in the link to an article in this lesson.
Personal preference and easy-of-use are your choices, but any of them should help with getting your content more framed for SEO consideration.
https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/advanced-excerpt/reviews/?filter=5
http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/easy-custom-auto-excerpt?filter=5
http://wordpress.org/plugins/automated-editing/
It's Your Turn
If you aren't sure how to create manual excerpts or can't find the excerpt box, here is a quick way to get them to show up so you can type in a quick excerpt while creating your post.
When you're logged in to the dashboard/backend of your site go to a blog post and open it. Then, at the very top right, you'll see where it says "screen options." Click that and then when it opens the menu make sure that excerpts have a box with a checkmark next to it. There will be a spot beneath your posts to then create excerpts.
We’re here to help—If you have questions or would like some examples of great excerpts, the BoardingArea team is standing by to assist you. A good excerpt should be 2-4 sentences, has any keywords in it, and is clever. You want it to be enticing enough to get someone to click on your link, but don’t lead your readers on—make sure you tell them what the post is about in the excerpt.