I’ve always wanted to put the excerpt field provided by wordpress to some good use but I never really realized what the best way to go about it would be and/or why I should spend the time writing an extra piece of information for the post.  Until now I’ve sometimes used them for replacing the frontpage snippet in case it broke due to not properly close html code and the like but nothing more than that.

In the end, the utility of the excerpts was so obvious that I had to slap my forehead for not thinking of it myself. Thankfully, someone else not only went to the trouble of explaining why excerpts were useful but also provided links and information for the tools you can use to utilize them best.

From: The manual Excerpt in WordPress. What, why, how, tips and plugins

WordPress excerpts, which are not excerpts, make a WordPress site easier to browse and its content easier to discover. In addition, when also used as META descriptions, good excerpts bring more and better traffic from search engines.

If you’re using wordpress, especially if it’s self-hosted, this is the kind of article you should be reading right now. The insights and improvement ideas would certainly make you rethink the way you utilize this underused feature and the concice and structured way this is presented makes the whole thing easy to go through and understand. As one commenter put it

Heard a cling and a thud ?
Well, it was my awesomeness-meter crashing !

What a post. Dugg deep, very deep into something that’s insanely powerful, but not appreciated, the WP Excerpts !

As for me, I’m already going through my latest posts and adding descriptive excerpts to all. I’m not going to go back to all 3 years of blogging (almost 4 now 🙂 ) but I plan to go through the last year at least.

Related articles by Zemanta

• WordPress Themes and the use of Excerpts (hummerbie.net)