Blog posts are obviously what your whole blog is all about.
You could have the best SEO on the planet, a huge amount of blog traffic arriving every day, but, without good fresh content they'll just head off somewhere else.
But, adding fresh content can cause problems of its own.
In this article we're going to look at what to do when your whole blog post appears on your home page and you haven't got a clue why, or how to put it right.
There are a number of great sites and articles out there that teach you all manner of things to do with blogs and putting things right with them, however, one small thing was happening that didn't really seem to be covered by them, that was how to stop your blog post from appearing in its entirety on your home page.
Now, for some people that may not seem like a problem, but, if you've set your blog up to show AdSense ads on the blog post, and not the home page, then it's going to seriously dent your potential income, after all, how many people will go to that post if they can read it all on the home page? Another reason why this may be a problem for many is because it reduces the exposure of other article snippets that you would want to appear of your home page.
A lot of the articles people will choose to read are because they have seen a blog excerpt on the home page.
Most people aren't going to start searching your site until they know the quality of your content, and the chances of doing that are reduced if you don't have blog excerpts for them to read.
The answer to the problem is, actually, quite simple.
When you create your blog post you need to add a few words of code to get the blog excerpt to stop where you want it to, that code is: < !-more- > Not only does adding this code give you the ability to pick the best spot for the article blog excerpt to break, it also give you a way to click through to the full blog post.
Plus, just in case you were wondering, the snippet of code doesn't appear in the post.
Since discovering that magical bit of code I've discovered that a lot of the newer blog themes take this problem into consideration when you add a new post.
Further down the screen they may have a box where you can insert any blog excerpt that you want and that means you don't have to try and remember to add the small piece of code to all the fresh content you're writing.
What does this also show us? Well it shows that the creators of these blog themes are starting to take the SEO side of things far more seriously - and so should you.
Doing your SEO correctly is going to bring in more blog traffic and, if you have the right blog theme, you aren't going to have to spend your time wondering what you need to be doing to each blog post so as to boost the SEO on it.
There we have it, a simple way to stop your full blog post from showing on your home page, and be able to specify how long it should be.
Just insert the code where you want the blog excerpt to end, or, if you find that your time is worth more than the cost of a good SEO blog theme, then pay out a bit of money and save yourself a lot of time.
Now all you'll need to concentrate on is the fresh content for your blog posts.