A little tip today to increase the [tag]SEO[/tag] effectiveness of your blog is…
Use the MORE feature wherever possible.
There is debate over this centered around whether or not it’s more reader friendly, more organizationally efficient and so on but I can tell you that from a search engine perspective (in other words, if you have a large percentage of your blog readers coming from search engines, this may be worth noting) it’s always best to use the MORE feature when you can.
You know the one I’m talking about right? When you’re writing a post (this is for WordPress users, sorry to discriminate against you blogger.com losers… haha, sorry) it’s the little icon that looks like a screen with a line through it – if you hover on it, it says “split the post with MORE tag”.
The reason is this:
If you don’t split the post, it means that the EXACT same content, the same post is on your www.yourdomain.com front page – as your www.yourdomain.com/your-post page – this = duplicate content which = SEO penalty.
I’m the first person to say that external duplicate content fears (like having your article on more than 1 directory) is overrated but INTERNAL duplicate content concern, like the example I’ve given in this post, is probably underrated.
If you already know this I apologize for the baby like treatment of the issue but if you don’t…
Something to think about 
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I have no idea what you’re talking about, but thanks. I’ll look into this MORE thing.
Take it easy. Don’t do too much crack.
Jason,
You know in wordpress when you’re writing a post and you can choose to split the post up so that only a part of it appears on the front page? You do it with a little button above the contents field
Check out the posts on my front page and you’ll see what I mean. Some are totally there but lots have the MORE thing at the end of them
Andrew
Okay. I know what you’re talking about now.
Thanks. See ya.
Absolutely Andrew
And you know what? There’s a nifty little WordPress plugin (for those hosting their blogs on their own domains) called “Post Teaser” that automates the “More” feature and adds cool little info too (like estimated reading time, word count, etc.). You can find it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/post-teaser/
From a confessed Worpress plugin junky,
Epiphany
While we’re freely giving out tips
, you can do the same thing in your index template[S] (there’s often more than one), automagically, by changing “the_content();” to “the excerpt();”. Or, even better, there’s another plug-in called “the_excerpt_reloaded” that extends “the_excerpt” and provides more control.
It is possible to mimic this on Blogger, but it does not have the same effect. Has to do with CSS and hiding text.
Thank, I will use the “more” tip.