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How to set the Number of Posts per Page in Wordpress.

This is a little Wordpress “How-To” post. I want to show you how to set the number of posts per page on a Wordpress blog and then talk a little bit about whether or not it is a good idea to use the “more” tag. I like to have just one post per page on my blogs. The reason is that I write each page with the intention of focusing on one or maybe two specific keywords. If you have multiple posts per page then Google might be a little confused about as to exactly what your page is about.

This can have an adverse effect on your rankings. Think for a minute about this. This you review a couple of different products and the posts are on the same page, Google is going to have a hard time figuring out if your page is about product “A” or product “B”. Google’s job is to provide relevant information to a search query. The search engine scans your site and gets a gist of your what your content is about.

So say someone searches for “Tennis Balls”. If Google sees that your page is about “Tennis Balls” and “Cheap Shotgun Powder” but there are other pages that focus just on tennis balls it will favor the more focused page. The last thing Google wants is for people to start saying, “I can never find what I’m looking for in Google. I was searching for tennis balls today and I got an article about Cheap Shotgun Powder.”

So always remember that it’s your job to make it easy for Google to know what your content is about and what it is relevant to.

Here’s how you can set the number of posts per page in Wordpress. It’s easy.

1. Go to the admin panel

2. Click Settings

3. Click Reading

This is the page where you can edit your reading settings including how many posts per page you want to show. You will see where it says “Blog pages show at most__” and you can fill in the number of posts per page you want. Simple.

One thing I would like to mention is the “more” tag. When you are writing your posts in wordpress you have to option to use a “more” tag. This will make it so that only a portion of your text is shown and readers need to click the “more” tag to read the rest of the article. I almost always do this. The reason is that spammers are constantly scraping the internet for free content. Yup, the will steal your content right from your feed reader and populate their sites with your content. This used to aggravate me a whole lot. I would spend some serious time writing a nice post and then in two days I would see it on some spam blog with no mention of me and no link to my site either.

I started using the “more” tag and it made it harder to get scraped. However I then decided to actually not use the more tag and instead I implemented a sneaky idea. I leave my posts intact now so that they are easily scraped by the spammers but, I make sure to put a link to my site in the first sentence of my post. This way, when my content gets scraped and put on some spam blog my link goes with it. I like to think of it as Viral Spam Link Marketing. I spam the spammers and it’s just a beautiful thing. There’s actually a way to take this idea to a whole new level and get lots of links this way, but I’m not going to get into now as I want to keep this post short, simple and to the point.

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 1:37 am and is filed under Writing Your Blog . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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