Do You Use a Blog Post Exerpt

**ScottTousignant** · September 15th, 2009

After listening to the amazing webinar today with Lynn and Karon and seeing the excellent use of seo descriptions I began to wonder if anyone uses the Advanced Option of an Excerpt when writing their blog posts with Wordpress?

Are there are advantages or disadvantages to that?

**Lynn Terry** · September 15th, 2009

I always use the Optional Excerpt feature when writing a blog post. But I do this because it is the text used in my blog email notification messages. If I do not include the excerpt, Aweber just grabs the first x-number of characters from my post. My leading paragraph may or may not be compelling enough to engage email readers so I use the Optional Excerpt to craft my own.

It does not control the description in the SERPs. Even if you use an SEO plugin to create a meta description tag, as we discussed today Google will not use it if they keyword phrase used in the search is not also in the description...

**ScottTousignant** · September 15th, 2009

How did I not know that about Aweber???

Thanks a million Lynn.

**Lynn Terry** · September 15th, 2009

Most welcome

I really love the customization flexibility that Aweber offers with their Blog Broadcast feature!

**angienewton** · September 15th, 2009

I use it too but I thought it was the text that shows up in the search engines. Is that not correct? I need to understand this better. Not sure I get it quite yet.

**TraciKnoppe** · September 15th, 2009

Angie: the meta description will show up in the search engines *only* if the keyword phrase the searcher used for their search is also contained with your meta description.

So say I used the phrase 'how to start a blog' in my meta description; but someone found my site using the search 'TweetDeck group function' (which I happen to be #1 for in Google

), my meta description would not show, only the first 55 words on my blog post would.

**StephenT** · September 15th, 2009

Thanks for giving that hint, Traci! I'll have to watch for that in my blogs!

**angienewton** · September 16th, 2009

OK, so is the meta description the same as the excerpt? If not, where do I find the meta description area without using a plug in or is that possible?

Thanks for explaining Traci, I do get that. YEA!