Read More: How to Optimize Blog Previews
What are the best practices to get the most traction from your main blog page and draw readers in to a post? "Read More," "Continue Reading" or something else?
It's not clear when blogging became the most utilized way of creating website content. What’s clear is that everyone has a different way of presenting their blog posts and enticing visitors to finish reading the post from the main blog page.
Checking My Blog Terminology
As I was writing this, I realized I had a slight problem identifying the words I was using to describe the exact element of the blog I repeatedly refer to below. Ironically, asking my co-workers ended up expanding the problem instead of resolving it.
Here's the dilemma:
What do you call the appearance of elements from a blog post that shows on the blog index page that aren't the full posts itself? I.e. The headline, image, perhaps a section of text.
Is it a blurb or excerpt even though those are usually just related to text? A slug, not the slimy kind? An SEOer might call it a Snippet like Google does on its results page. Is it an entry even though it's not the whole post? Is it a leader because it leads you to the full post? Is it a post, just not a "full" post? How about a blog preview? For convenience sake, through the rest of the post I will refer to it as the "blog preview."
Elements of a Blog Preview
Not everyone has their blog set up the same way. Blogger does it differently from Wordpress by default. Here are all of the various elements I've seen that compose blog previews:
- Headline
- Image
- Text Snippet from the post anywhere from 50 characters to multiple paragraphs
- Count of social shares on various networks
- Number of Comments
- Author of the post
- Date and/or time of the post
- Prompt for reads to read the full entry
The Whole Shebang
It's worth mentioning some blogs, like Tumblr blogs, actually display the entire post. You might consider this approach if you want to encourage the most recent post above all other content, as your audience will see fewer (or just one) posts.
However, if you're confident in the engaging nature of your writing, you may want to feature your content on your main blog page as a way to keep visitors scrolling for more and not requiring them to click through.
Clickable or Not Clickable
The Verge makes the whole preview clickable and adds a color change when someone hovers over it to entice clicks.
The headline is the bare minimum to make clickable. This is true across every blog I've ever encountered. Though the image, as it takes up more visual space, is usually expected to be clickable, too.
What else should you make clickable? I thought I'd get a second opinion and asked our newest developer, Chris Roberts, to chime in with his thoughts.
“The short explanation is to make it as easy as possible for visitors to access content,” said Roberts. “Take advantage of those opportunities to present a link. Just be sure the content [whether that's text or an image] has a sufficient hook that people want to keep on reading.”
To Prompt or Not To Prompt
The standard practice for blogs that don't display the entire posts is to add a linked prompt for the reader to click and read the rest of the entry. Here are some examples to consider: (but remember that it's not a mandatory addition to the blog preview.)
The most common linked phrase is almost always "Read more" or "Read more..." (throwing that ellipses into play for all you English majors).
SEO Vs Clicks
I thought I'd do more than just highlight all the different ways you can do blog previews and drill down to some of the potential values for driving additional clicks or driving long term value for your search engine rankings. I talked to two SEO experts who gave some additional opinions to consider on the topic of how changes to your blog preview might impact your site's SEO and ability to rank in search engines.
"You should treat blog previews the way you like treat writing different headlines for search, site and social. Definitely don't use this link for SEO/anchor [text]. But instead use it as clickbait. More clicks is [equivalent to] better rankings anyway. And if you have to think about it in SEO terms, clickbait allows you to create keyword diversity around a topics" - Jonathan Allen
"The general rule of thumb for me is to have the TITLE of the post linked and to have a 'read more' at the bottom of the snippet. That allows for the option of clicking straight away onto the post, or after reading the snippet. Google probably uses the first link priority, so having two links to [the blog post] on the page won't really dilute any equity (PageRank). " David Harry, The SEO Dojo
What Is The Best Setup for Blog Previews?
If you've worked with anyone who does search engine optimization, then you're familiar with the phrase, ”It depends.” The important thing is not just accepting whatever default your CMS or blog platform provides because there is value in having blog traffic consume the content in your individual posts so they come back for more in the future. [Read More...]
About Jeremy
SEO will never be dead to Jeremy. He believes if you actually work to make sites better and learn to create authoritative content, while not gaming the system, there will always be a need for SEOs.