Optional Excerpt - The Third Meta Tag for Blogs
Published on: May 15, 2008
Dynamic blog website are not like static websites. The SEO rules are somewhat different. And, those in the know treat the Optional Excerpt field just as if it was an important SEO meta tag, precisely because it is.
In SEO work your consistent use of meta tags is very important.
For WordPress blogs, you essentially have a third meta tag that needs to be religiously filled out that static webpage sites do not have: The Optional Excerpt field.
The important Search Engine Optimization tags for your WordPress Blog are:
- Title tag
- Meta Description
- Optional Excerpt
Bloggers should be using a SEO plugin of their choice to make sure that these fields are filled in for each post.
The title tag and your post title are usually identical to each other, except that occasionally the title tag allows you to enhance it for SEO purposes.
The meta description occasionally shows up in the SERPs under certain conditions.
And, likewise the Optional Excerpt field shows up in some situations such as in Google’s Blog search engine listings. It is an invisible field that Google and sites external to your blog are often aware of. So, everything indicates that Google is using the Optional Excerpt field to calculate your SERPs placement. Generally, the meta description and optional excerpt fields are identical. In free WordPress blogs, the optional excerpt field is a very important replacement for your meta description and title tags.
May 17, 2008 at 7:23 am
Some themes, including the one used by this blog, have a separate categories template that uses the Optional Excerpt field in order to avoid duplicate content.
I deleted those category and archive templates, and put everything into the main index template. And, avoid duplicate content issues by blocking categorgies and archives from being indexed by Google.
That way you only have to look at how posts are displayed everywhere in only one template rather than in three different ones. Makes it simpler to maintain, IMHO.