The Important Of Writing Excerpts For Your Posts
Many Bloggers Don’t Do It, And That Hurts Their Traffic
One incredibly easy thing that bloggers can do to increase their search engine traffic is to write excerpts for the posts they create. Although this may seem like an incredibly easy thing to do, most bloggers don’t take the time to do it.
The Average Google search returns only 20 words for each page! In those 20 words, you are trying to convince each of the searchers to visit your page. Those 20 words are precious, and if you let Google auto generate them for you, you are hurting your chances of attracting visitors. After all, who knows your site best? Who can write the best sales pitch for your page? You or Google?
You can use your excerpt to attract visitors. At the bottom of blog posts, at least on Wordpress, is the option to include an excerpt of the post. That excerpt is what is going to be displayed when your site is returned from a search.
Some people think they don’t have time to do this. However they are mistaken in that belief. If you just spent 10 minutes writing a 500 word post, won’t you have 1 minutes to write a 25 word excerpt of that post? That time will quickly pay for itself in SEO work that you won’t have to do.
Excerpts can have a huge impact on driving traffic. When comparing pages in which I had written the excerpt vs pages where I let it default I found that I got over 50% more search engine traffic when I wrote the excerpt. This tells you that searchers tend to go for hand written summaries rather than machine generated ones. Lorelle has also written about how and why you should write post excerpts.
Try writing excerpts for your posts for a while and let me know what the result is.
on May 21st, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Interesting… do you know if you can do this retroactively? I mean go back and write excerpts for old posts, or does it need to be done before you publish?
on May 21st, 2007 at 2:50 pm
That’s a good question. You can add excerpts at any time, or you can rewrite the first paragraph of your blog posts better, or continue writing them better from now on.
The issue for search engines is that they have already stored your older pages in their database. Getting those updated is painful, but does happen, especially if a new ping is sent for the updated page to search engines. Still, it takes time.
If you haven’t been writing good opening paragraphs, or using excerpts, start now and let the old ones just do whatever they do. If you want to update them, it won’t hurt anything and will actually improve your page rank by making “improvements” to the pages. But put your energy wherever it will work best for you and your blog.
on May 21st, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Hi Lorelle,
Thanks for stopping by. I guess pinging does work
Rich, Lorelle answered the question better than I could. I know that I’m not going to go back and update my excerpts for the posts that I missed for the most part. I may watch to see which ones are getting at least some Google traffic, and if any of those don’t have excerpts, or have Google snippets which are bad, I might try to improve them and see if it kicks the traffic up a notch
on May 22nd, 2007 at 11:07 am
Scott,
Pinging doesn’t work. Trackbacks don’t work. Haven’t you learned…I don’t need those. I work in strange and mysterious ways and I’m everywhere.
on May 22nd, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Oops, Sorry Lorelle
What I meant to say was that pinging can be good for getting other blogger’s attention.
If you want to get noticed by Lorelle, then don’t worry. She already read your blog even before you posted it.
Is that a more accurate description? I don’t want to cast doubt on your abilities.
on May 29th, 2007 at 9:38 am
You summed it up perfectly. Keep the mystesry going!