The manual Excerpt in WordPress

Using this post i finally understand what exerpts are for and how to use them, you can read the original here: http://op111.net/67

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.

This article looks into the WordPress Excerpt and explains how to use it.

CONTENTS

1. What is the WordPress excerpt
2. Why write excerpts in WordPress
3. How to write excerpts
4. WordPress Excerpt Editor
5. Excerpts as META descriptions
6. Notes, Miscellaneous
7. Links

1. What is the WordPress excerpt

The excerpt in WordPress is a short summary of a post. It is written by hand and it can replace the full post in places where a summary is preferable.

Or, as the Excerpt box says:

Excerpts are optional hand-crafted summaries of your content. You can use them in your template.

In other words, the WordPress excerpt is not an excerpt! It is not a part taken from a post, but an extra piece of information added to a post, in the same way that tags are added. And, like tags, it is optional. To add an excerpt, you write one in the Excerpt box, right under the post editor:

NOTE. Up to WordPress 2.6 the Excerpt box was in Advanced Options.

But why bother with writing excerpts?

2. Why write excerpts in WordPress

Because of what happens if you don’t!

The following assumes a theme that displays excerpts in search results and in author/category/date/tag archives. Many WordPress themes don’t. For a solution, see WordPress Excerpt Editor, on which more in a while.

2.1. Archive pages and search results

Let’s see an example:

When you search for minimalist+wordpress in op111.net, one result is “Five clean, minimalist themes for WordPress”, along with a brief description:

Five good WordPress themes examined and compared: Basic2Col, Moo Point, Sandbox, Simplish, and Thematic.

This description is the excerpt I wrote. If I hadn’t written one, then the first 55 words of the review (that is, the automatic excerpt) would be displayed instead:

UPDATED 2009-02-13. I recently decided to look for a good minimalist theme for op111.net. I did not expect it would be an easy search, and, in a sense, it wasn’t. (Partly because WordPress had been going for some time without a central repository of themes. Now there is one, but it is still young.) […]

Which one is better for a list of search results? I agree!

The drawbacks of the automatic excerpt are obvious, but let me enumarate them for the sake of argument:

1. The beginning of a piece is usually an introduction, not a summary.
2. Even if it is a summary, 55 words are too many for a list of search results.

On the other hand, by writing a manual excerpt I was able to add 3 extra pieces of information to the information provided by the title, and say what I wanted to say, in just 13 words and 105 characters.

Even if I the excerpt I wrote is mediocre, it can be scanned instantly by the eye. Not only that: Since the other results have excerpts too, the results page is now more appealing and more useful as a whole. And the same goes for archive pages—archives by date, category, tag, or author—since excerpts can be used there too.

In a sense, hand-written excerpts are good navigational devices: They help visitors find easier what they look for. Or, if that does not exist, they let visitors know, so that they don’t click back and forth for no reason and get frustrated in the end.

2.2. Result pages in search engines

Most interestingly, you can use this navigational device off-site too!

Let’s see an example again. Try this search on Google, Live Search, or Yahoo!. You’ll get something like:

It’s a typical SERP item: A title, a URL address and, in the middle, a short description, which is exactly the excerpt I wrote!

How did Live Search know about that? This text does not appear anywhere in the indexed page. How did it get on the SERP? Did Microsoft guess it in some way? No! The answer is simple:

In op111.net excerpts double up as META descriptions.

Regularly, search engines compile the description of a result by extracting and putting together bits from the page. However, if the page has a META description, and if they think it is a good description and relevant to the search query, they display that instead.

This means that, to a certain degree, META descriptions let you control how your content is described by search engines. And if a description is good, people are more likely to click on the link.

More on WordPress Excerpts as META descriptions in Part 5.

2.3. Summing up the Whys

1. Manual excerpts help visitors navigate a site easier and find good results.
2. Manual excerpts can double as META descriptions, which are frequently used by search engines to describe search results. In this way, good excerpts increase and improve traffic from search engines.
3. Therefore, you should write excerpts by hand!

3. How to write excerpts

You are persuaded. You’ll never hit Publish again without writing an excerpt first! But how to write one?

Writing good excerpts is not easy. It’s an art. (Not one I presume to be a master of, let me say, to avoid misunderstandings.) Writing a decent excerpt, however, only takes common sense. What is the excerpt for? What is its purpose? Answering this question will help us find what the excerpt must be like.

PURPOSE OF THE EXCERPT

To help readers tell at a glance if a page is what they look for.

To do that, the excerpt must be:

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE EXCERPT

1. Brief
2. Informative

3.1. How brief

As brief as possible! My rule is to write no more than 160 characters, partly because I use excerpts as meta descriptions too. (More on that in Part 5.) For English, 160 characters is 25 to 30 words. It may seem too little but it’s not.

First, the excerpt is never displayed alone. It always goes with the title. So, for the purpose of providing a summary description these two are a set: title + excerpt. Assuming that a title should be up to 70 characters and that the average word length is 5 letters, we have:

( 70 + 160 ) ÷ ( 5 + 1 ) ≈ 38

That’s thirty-eight words in sum! You can almost write a good CV in 38 words! 🙂

Second, if you follow good practice, you can say lots of things in 160 characters. Not only that, but your excerpts will be better and more effective as a result.

TIPS FOR CONCISE EXCERPTS/SUMMARIES

• Prefer short words. E.g., write “use”, not “utilize” (unless you mean “utilize”).
• Prefer simple constructs. E.g., say “because”, “since”, or “as”, not “due to the fact that”.
• Prefer verbs to abstract nouns. Abstract nouns are longer and less lively.
• Use adjectives and adverbs sparingly. Does that adjective really need an adverb to qualify it?
• Read over to remove needless words.

3.2. How informative

As much as possible! The main rules I try to follow are two:

First, be honest and try to summarize the content accurately and objectively. Do not write aggresively promotional copy. Imagine a friend asked you about the page. How would you describe it to them? Use the same description as your excerpt.

Second, complement the title. The excerpt always goes with the title, so there is no reason to repeat what the title says. Some repetition is unavoidable and may also be useful, e.g. for emphasis, but, other than that, try to add to the title and to complement the title.

TIPS FOR INFORMATIVE EXCERPTS/SUMMARIES

• Describe honestly and accurately. As if you were describing to a friend.
• Complement the title in any relevant aspect; things like:
  • Amount. Simply add more information.
  • Scope. E.g., provide the general context for a specific title.
  • Tone. E.g., write a serious excerpt to balance a playful title.
  • Variety. E.g., if a word in the title has a common variation, use it in the excerpt. (To facilitate humans, not to trick machines.)
• Write excerpts last. Then you have a better overview.
• Revisit you excerpts. Even if you got everything perfect the first time, other things may have changed.

Let’s see some tools now.

4. WordPress Excerpt Editor

The default means offered by WordPress to manage excerpts is the Excerpt box. If you are serious about excerpts, you need more. Fortunately, even though the Excerpt seems to be underappreciated, there are several good plugins to manage excerpts. Part 5 suggests two plugins to generate META descriptions from excerpts, while the Links at the end include a couple more excerpt plugins.

This part looks at one plugin for excerpts that, in my estimation, offers the most general usefulness:

WORDPRESS EXCERPT EDITOR

WordPress Excerpt Editor lets you do many things:

• Add and edit excerpts quickly
• Add excerpts to pages
• Control the appearance of excerpts
• Display excerpts instead of full content on index pages (if your theme doesn’t)
• Display excerpts instead of full content on the homepage
• And more!

If you need to add excerpts to a large number of posts retrospectively, Excerpt Editor is a great convenience. It brings all excerpts, empty and filled-in, together in one place, so that you can edit or add excerpts one after the other. For posts with no excerpt, it shows the first 70 words to help you start. Once you are finished, you click Save and it goes to the next post:

It also lets you add excerpts to WordPress pages, which is not possible without a plugin.

If you only need Excerpt Editor for these two features, you can deactivate it when you finish and reactivate it the next time you want to add or edit excerpts to posts or pages.

Going into the extended functionality of Excerpt Editor, I think what would be useful to most people is “Replace Posts”:

If your theme does not support excerpts, in “Replace Posts” you can define when and where to show excerpts instead of full content. You can even have the homepage display only excerpts but show the latest post in full.

Considering all the functionality that Excerpt Editor has grown to have, I believe a better name for it would be “Excerpt Manager”.

5. Excerpts as META descriptions

5.1. What is a META description

The language in which most webpages are written is HTML or its cousin XHTML. A META description is an optional set of data in the head of an (X)HTML document that describes the content of the document. “META” means that this set of data is metadata or meta-information; that is, data about data, or information about information: about the information in the document itself.

A basic XHTML document with a META description looks like this:

Click to see how this document appears in a web browser.

Unlike the title and any text in the body, the META description of a document is not displayed by web browsers. Browsers understand it, however, as do other programs, like the robots that index webpages for search engines.

When search engines were still young and dumb, in the early period of the commercial Web, they used to rely on this description, and also on the “keywords” meta element, to understand what a page is about and how relevant it is to a query. As a consequence, description and keywords were abused to senselessness by webmasters. Search engines, at least the ones that matter, don’t do that any more. They do NOT use description and keywords for indexing and ranking. However, they still use description, very frequently, for what its original purpose was: Description!

The reason why search engines are interested in the meta description is the same reason why web authors should use it. The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog explains:

The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL. […]

We want snippets to accurately represent the web result. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don’t achieve this goal and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular, non-meta description, snippet. And it’s worth noting that while accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won’t affect your ranking within search results.

SOURCE: Raj Krishnan, Google Snippets Team, in Improve snippets with a meta description makeover, 27 September 2007.

This quotation says it all. Considering its source, I don’t think I need to add anything. — I’ll just quote one more example of search results:

Searching for “clean minimalist themes” in Google returned, among other results, two op111.net pages. Both have meta descriptions. Google seems to think that the descriptions are descriptive enough AND relevant enough to the search query, so it uses them. If these pages did not have meta descriptions, Google would make descriptions by putting together bits from the content.

5.2. Using WordPress excerpts as META descriptions

You can write meta descriptions in WordPress by using a plugin. But if the posts already have excerpts, there is no reason to do that. You can use the excerpts as meta descriptions!

In the WordPress logic, this is simple. In the same way that we tell WordPress to get the post_title field from the database and use it as a title for a post, we can tell WordPress to get post_excerpt and use it as a meta description. Only we can’t do that in a default setup. We need a plugin. Here are two for you to choose:

5.2.a. Platinum SEO

Platinum SEO Pack does most things automatically. Once you install it, all posts with excerpts will also have meta descriptions. You don’t need to do anything else. (The same is true for All in One SEO Pack, on which Platinum SEO is based.)

If a post has no excerpt, Platinum SEO will use its first 150 characters as a meta description. This is the option “Autogenerate Descriptions”, which is enabled by default:

My advice is to disable “Autogenerate Descriptions”. If you have posts without excerpts, leave it to the search engines to piece together descriptions for them.

If you want to use a meta description different from the exerpt for a particular post, simply go to the post editor and write one in the SEO Platinum Pack box, in the Description field.

5.2.b. Headspace2

HeadSpace2 allows much finer control of the head of XHMTL pages and can do that and much more, but does nothing by default. Setting it to generate meta descriptions from excerpts is easy:

1. Go to HeadSpace Settings › Page Settings
2. Click to edit the Posts & Pages section
3. Type %%excerpt_only%% in the Description box
4. Save your changes

This tells HeadSpace2 to generate meta descriptions for all posts and pages with excerpts.

To use a meta description different from the excerpt for a particular post or page, simply go to the page/post editor and write a meta description for that page or post:

Last, HeadSpace trims meta descriptions to 150 characters. You can change this value in HeadSpace Settings › Page Modules › Page Description. (I use 168.)

5.2.c. Theme that autogenerates META descriptions

If WordPress plugins can take an excerpt and use it as a meta description, so can WordPress themes. One theme that does this is Hybrid:

It would be good to see more themes doing the same, either as an option or, even better, as a default setting. Maybe it would be a good idea for the WordPress core too.

5.3. Length of META descriptions

Since META descriptions are written for search engines, what matters here is what search engines do. At this writing (February 2009), Google seems to use up to 160 characters to describe search results, Yahoo! up to 170, and Live Search up to 180:

LENGTH OF DESCRIPTIONS (SNIPPETS/ABSTRACTS) IN SEARCH ENGINES IN FEB 2009

• ≤ 160 characters in Google
• ≤ 170 characters in Yahoo!
• ≤ 180 characters in Live Search

So, if you want your descriptions to be displayed in whole when used by search engines, do not exceed 160 characters. For English, that’s about 25–28 words.

For a quick check-up of your meta descriptions, you can use the Diagnostics tool in Google Webmaster Tools. It will tell you whether you have too long, too short, or duplicate descriptions, how many of each, and it will point you to the pages that need attention:

6. Notes, Miscellaneous

6.1. Excerpts for pages

WordPress supports page excerpts (the database field is the same as for posts: post_excerpt) but offers no way to add excerpts to pages. WordPress Excerpt Editor makes no such distinction and lets you add excerpts to both posts and pages. If you create pages often, another plugin you may find useful is PJW Page Excerpt: It adds an Excerpt box to the page editor, same as the Excerpt box of the post editor.

6.2. Teasers

The “teaser” is another useful optional device of WordPress, which is often confused with the Excerpt. You make a teaser by inserting the more tag in a post. (The More button is to the left of the spellchecker.) Then, the part above the more tag becomes a “teaser” and is displayed by default on the front page in lieu of the full content, along with a Read More link.

The relation between the Teaser and the two Excerpts, manual and automatic, is this: If a post has no manual excerpt, WordPress looks for a teaser and uses that instead. If the post has no teaser either, then WordPress uses its first 55 words as an excerpt.

6.3. That’s it!

The WordPress Excerpt is a narrow subject but rather confusing for it scope. I tried to make some sense of it by focusing on what seemed essential to me and without going into too much detail. If you think there is still too much detail, or not enough detail, please leave a comment to say so. If you are still perplexed about the excerpt that is not an excerpt, please ask. In any case, feel free to say what you think. Your contribution is appreciated.

Thanks for reading!

δκ

7. Links

7.1. General

Template Tags/the excerpt

Documentation for the function the_excerpt() in the WordPress wiki.

Wanted: Excerpt Exacter

“I need a WordPress plugin that won’t let me publish a post until I’ve filled in the excerpt field. Anyone got one?” By Eric Meyer.

WordPress Now Available (v0.70)

Release notes for the first public release of WordPress, v0.70, in May 2003. The Excerpt is among the highlighted features: “Manual Excerpts — This allows you to handcraft summaries of your posts to appear in your RSS feed and other places.”

7.2. WordPress plugins for excerpts

Advanced Excerpt

Tweaks the excerpts that WordPress generates automatically when the Excerpt field is empty.

HeadSpace2

Powerful metadata manager for WordPress. Can be used for SEO and for much more!

Platinum SEO Pack

A WordPress plugin for easy search-engine optimization. (Based on All in One SEO Pack.)

PJW Page Excerpt

Adds an Excerpt box to the page editor, same as the one in the post editor, to add excerpts to pages.

WordPress Excerpt Editor

An excerpt editor, formatter, and manager for WordPress.

7.3. “description” META element

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

Good concise (22 pages) SEO guide in PDF format, by Google. It has a section on the “description” element.

Google Webmaster Tools

A set of useful tools by Google. Among other things, they analyze your META descriptions and tell you if there is anything wrong with them.

Making the Most of Meta Description Tags

How to write good meta descriptions, by Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz.

META element

“META element” at Wikipedia.

Video: anatomy of a search snippet

Matt Cutts of Google explains on video how descriptions are generated in Google results. (English and Korean captions available.)

7.4. Also mentioned or seen in this article

Hybrid

A WordPress theme and also a “WordPress theme framework”.

Opera

Cross-platform web browser.

Tangofy

More helpful icons in the administration area of WordPress 2.7.

WordPress

WordPress, an extensible publishing platform.