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Jason Lancaster: So, here's my Wordpress SEO tip for today.
A lot of people are not using Wordpress' built in More tag, and there's a good reason that you should be using that if you're not.
So, I'm looking at one of my blogs here. This is a travel blog that my wife and I write.
And you can see that this post I just wrote; the entire post is on the home page.
And I've got a couple of pictures, I've got a few paragraphs, etcetera.
This is bad, because Google and other search engines are confused, right?
We've got an entire post here, and then if I click on the link to the post itself, I've got the exact same content on another page of my blog.
Now, Google has to determine which post do they index. Do they index the one on the home page, or do they index the one here?
Now, if someone; if I get a lot of comments on this blog post then I'll be OK, because Google's going to pick the page with the unique content, which means the page with comments.
But if I don't get a lot of comments, and let's face it, a lot of times blog posts don't get comments, then you're going to end up with, like I say, duplicate content,
and there's a pretty good chance that Google's going to miss this; the blog post itself.
They're going to index your home page, but they're not going to index the blog post.
Fortunately, there's a really easy fix. There's something called the More tags.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to edit this post right here and I'm gonna go to a full-screen view so you can see the entire thing really easily.
So, you're gonna do; here's the whole post. I'm gonna break this post into two pieces.
I'm going to put one piece on the front page and then I'm gonna put the rest on the individual post page.
And, again, it's just the More tag.
The More tag, we just put the cursor wherever we want it to go, which I'm going to put it at the end of this line right here.
And then you're gonna look for a funny little icon. It looks like two white rectangles with a line break between them.
And you'll see that Google; excuse me: Wordpress; inserts a line break here and a little tiny More thing over here on the right.
That's it! That's all we have to do.
I'm gonna leave full-screen view and update the blog post.
And now when we look at the home page, instead of seeing the entire post, which is what we've got right now, I'll refresh and we will see a shortened version.
And the shortened version (right? Just two paragraphs and a picture) has a nice little "Read more" link or "Read more here" link.
Depending on how your theme is set up, this link text will change.
But anyway, that's it, right?
So, if someone's reading my blog, they've got just enough information here to decide to read more about this post, and Google is no longer confused.
They know that this is just a snippet on the home page and that they do need to index the specific blog post.
And then that way I get more visitors, more pages in the index, better rankings, etcetera.
Anyway, good Wordpress SEO tip: Use the More tag.