How to change post excerpt length in wordpress – Manual SEO tricks

Did you know that you can Manually set word limit from 55 to any number you like, for each small WordPress post excerpt?

Interested in optimizing your WordPress SEO? You have to ask yourself, why should I bother to limit post excerpt length on WordPress? Are excerpts bad for SEO? Should I manually set a larger custom content length for my WordPress Blog Posts? What’s for me if I show more or less than 55 words at my post excerpts? The answer is simple… Better SEO! Since content is the king, showing in your front page more text, which might contain more SEO oriented words as keywords, the advantage is in front of your reader’s eyes…a few more words, bolded, may catch his or her glimpse!

Moreover, search engines crawl a richer text in keywords, which eventually leads to new traffic! Be careful, you must include in the text excerpt  your top SEO keywords, at the first 100 words, but be cautious not to stuff too many with the same meaning. Try to be natural to the reader. Avoid keyword stuffing, which is a bad practice for SEO.

What is the Post Excerpt in WordPress (WordPress excerpt length)?

An excerpt is a small part of a single post, that links to the full article. It is used to attract the interest of your readers and make them more willing to press the read more button, in order to read further about your posted article in your blog. It helps to highlight key points of your content, as sometimes a title is not enough to get your audience’s attention. By default, WordPress uses a small piece of text around fifty-five (55) words, but this can easily change to any number you like.

How to Change The Default Post Excerpt Length In WordPress.

Find your functions.php and include the following piece of code:

/* Manually set word limit from 55 to any number you like(I set to 120 words), of each small excerpt at blog page */
function my_excerpt_length($length) {
return 120;
}
add_filter('excerpt_length', 'my_excerpt_length');

If for any reason, the above code doesn’t work, you should contact the developer of the theme you are using and ask how you can tweak the excerpt lengths for your theme. Many themes (especially premium themes) have their own built-in functions for excerpts to allow for greater control.

It is always good to change the default excerpt length to make the excerpt somewhat meaningful so that the users can understand the content just by looking at it.

Photo attribution : Image by Werner Moser from Pixabay for wordpress excerpt length

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