Should your post have a Table of Contents? - Weblog Writer Journey - Day 13
Do long posts need a Table of Contents?
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| Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash |
I think they do. I've been looking for a Table of Contents to include in longer posts. I will link to an article I am writing about why a Table of Contents is a good idea for longer posts. It seems to be the trend that posts in order to rank are very long which requires a lot of scrolling. A table of contents lets one jump to the important points without having the scroll.
Should you just manually code your Table of Contents?
The first couple of solutions I looked at required too much manual coding. If one creates a Table of Contents by inserting links, then one must forever update those links. I think the answer is some sort of system working with tags or HTML h1,h2,h2 header tags. This would force the writer to use the h1,h2,h3 tabs in a logical, outline-like fashion and I certainly haven't done so.
Should you link to your own posts?
Internal linking is an important part of building a blog site. An example would be what I just wrote in the first paragraph of this post. I'm writing an article about the importance of a 'Table of Contents', so I ought to link to that article, not just mention it without linking to it. There are some automated tools in Wordpress to make this easier. (Link Whisperer comes to mind.) I've not heard of a similar tool for Blogger.
MyBloggerTricks.com shows what is possible with Blogger.
