If a picture paints a thousand words, you will want to keep them in your excerpts!
An excerpt, in case you did not know, is a reduced version of a post which goes below the initial post on the home page. So you get one post in full and then a lot of excepts. Shortened versions with a link to take you to the posts own ‘page’.
Excepts are good for several reasons:
- They help your SEO. Apparently Google does not like repeated content, so if your posts are in full both on the home page and on their own page, you will be penalised
- It makes it easier for people to scroll down and find what they are looking for. This is particuarly useful if you tend to write long posts
- It encourages people to visit the post ‘page’. As this is where the comments box is they are then more likley to post a comment
Headway, the theme I use, creates excerpts automatically, which is nice. If you don’t use a theme such as Headway though, you may need to find a plugin which will make the excerpts for you. I had this problem with my Green Blogging blog, and I found and now use Excerpt Editor there.
By defualt, Wordpress strips out all the code in excerpts and just presents the text. However, this is a bit boring, and also annoying if you have gone to some trouble to find the right pictures.
Excerpt Editor kept my images in my Green Blogging blog, but the Headway service did not. I was particularly keen to keep the pictures in my Lodger Landlord blog. The pictures in many cases define the post, and would be useful for people scanning the list of excerpts looking for a particular post. But how to do it? Time to look for another plugin.
I found one eventually. There are several that I suspect would do the job, but the one I used (and am using here at the time of writing) is Thumbnail for Excerpts. I chose this one as I liked the fact that it said it would make my life easier!
And it works. As you can see. Bingo! The only problem that if you do not have an image on the post, it show a rather ugly holding white image. This is not a problem with the Lodger Landlord site where I have always had one image per post, but it means I cannot use it on my Landlord Law Blog. This was set up about 4 years ago and for at least a year and a half at the start there are no images at all. But that is not a problem really as I have a lot of other images scattered around to make the site look nice.
I have had to put in quite a few images on this blog though.
What do you think? Do you use excepts on your blog? Do you think keeping the pictures is a good idea? What plugins do you use?
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