When you click publish, WordPress will faithfully publish your new post. Depending on how your site is set up, it will appear on your home page, or in a sidebar, or both. It will also be added to the archives related to the category, tags and author.
When I first started using WordPress, I would enter my article, proof it and then click publish. The article would magically appear on my home page something like these 2 examples. Pretty cool!
Take a moment now to read the description for these 2 posts.
In both examples, I am blabbering on before getting to the point of the article. I did not know about excerpts. If you do not have an excerpt, WordPress will take the first part of your post and use it as the excerpt. This is not always a very good teaser for your article.
Now look at these same 2 posts which now have an excerpt.
Much stronger. It lets the reader know what the post is about. Think of it as a teaser, or a lead in. Here is one more example.
Before …
And after …
Confession … if you surf through my archives, you will see quite a few posts that I have yet to update with an excerpt. Like I said, I did not know this when I started. So I have about 100 posts to update and I am doing so bit by bit. While I do them, I am also updating other things for better SEO, like the image titles for example.
How To Enter An Excerpt
It’s really easy. All you need to do is scroll down past your article (in edit mode) and look for this little box.
Enter your excerpt there. If you are not seeing that box, read Have You Set Your WordPress Screen Options?
A Few Notes
If you look again at the examples above, you will see that the ones without excerpts have a [read more…] link whereas the one’s with the excerpts do not. That is because WordPress does not give you a read more link for excerpts. I have never found this to be a problem as readers know to click on the title or the image to get to the post. That said, if you would like to have a read more link, you can do it one of 2 ways.
- You can enter HTML in your excerpt. This can be very useful but also requires some skill. It’s also time-consuming and as one of our dear readers might say: “Gil, that just makes my head hurt!”
- If you are using the Genesis framework, you can read this post by Travis Smith – How to Add Read More Link to Excerpts in your Genesis Child Theme. It provides code that you can place in your functions.php file that will magically make read more links appear in your excerpts. If you are not comfy editing PHP files, then ask someone who is to help you!
If you have entered your excerpt and updated your post and the excerpt is not showing up on your homepage, archives or sidebars, that’s because you’ll need to configure a few things in your site settings and widget settings. It’s simple and I will cover that in part 2.
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