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5 Top Reasons to Use the “more” Tag on Your Blog

Posted by hts | November 27, 2007 .

As you might have noticed, all posts on this blog are trimmed after few sentences (which shortly and quickly describe what the post is about). This is done, as you might already know, by using the <!––more––> tag, specific to Wordpress publishing platform. Now, if you don’t do this, too, on your blog, maybe you should start to do so. Here are some good reasons which might convince you:

  1. Homepage scrolling is annoying

    2. If you choose to display on the homepage of your blog the latest 10 posts (like most bloggers do) and if those posts are quite lengthy, then your homepage will stretch quite a lot, forcing the reader to scroll down a lot in order to reach the end of the page. Trust me, if I have to scroll more than 2-3 times to get to the end of a blog page (also where the navigation usually is placed), I get really annoyed. Period.

  2. More pageviews

    3. If you don’t use the “more” tag, a visitor might read the whole post on the homepage, without clicking and browsing further to that post’s page. Therefore, you are losing LOTS of pageviews - and you really need pageviews if you monetize your blog with CPM (or even CPC) ads. In fact, just think about this: you may as well double your pageviews by using the “more” tag. So go ahead, just use it.

  3. More pageviews - no. 2

    4. If a person is reading your blog in a RSS reader (and lots of people do that, you know? Like… all your RSS subscribers), he might as well not even visit your blog (that is, clicking the link in the RSS reader to go to the actual page), because he already read that post. So this is yet another reason to use the “more” tag - your RSS readers will have to view the page on YOUR site (blog, whatever), in order to read the full article / post.

  4. Targeted ads

    5. Basically, it is all about getting the reader to go to a certain page - a specific post’s page. And what does this has to do with advertising? Well, picture this situation in your mind: you have a blog on technology/internet/ maybe gadgets and you write a review (maybe a paid one, whatever) about a digital camera. Now, let’s say you use Google Adsense or TTZ Media Network which display ads related to your content / keywords. While on your homepage, you might or might not get to display an ad about digital cameras, on the inner page, the one specifically about a digital camera, you can be sure to get such an ad, which will most probably pay better. So basically, using the “more” tag is useful in order to get the visitor to see what ads you want them to see.

  5. Related posts, social sharing and comments

    6. It’s again about getting the user to visit inner pages, and not only the homepage of your blog. And that’s because on the inner page, he is offered to read, at the end of a post, related posts to the one he just read, options to submit the post to social sites or to rate that post. Also, after reaching the end of a post, a reader will most likely read the comments, too, which in turn, encourages him to do the same.

So that’s all folks - for now. You might ask yourself whether splitting the post with the “more” tag will lose your readership’s attention. Well, that’s why you are here - you have at your disposal the headline and the first few paragraphs of a post to catch a reader’s attention and make him click the “more” link. But about drawing a reader’s attention - on a later post. Stay tuned!

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4 Comments so far
  1. Nick November 28, 2007 5:00 am

    I don’t like to use the more tag, so in my theme, I replaced with . This automatically trims the post for you and adds the “Read More” link. Just another option to the more tag.

  2. Nick November 28, 2007 5:01 am

    I replaced with “the_content();” with “the_excerpt();” in php tags. Sorry about that…

  3. hts November 28, 2007 5:19 am

    Well, I was just saying about the tag by itself. Of course, you can customise the link to your desire. As you can see here on my blog, the link reads “Continue to read”. The message can be customised.. I just wanted to emphasize the importance of the “more” tag by itself :)

  4. Nick November 28, 2007 3:42 pm

    I was just saying that there was more than one way to do it. I know it is really important, I just wanted to introduce another way to achieve it.