Use of the 'More Tag' in Blogs, Question.

I was reading this article on the homepage of SEO chat. He mentioned using the 'more tag' for your blog.... explained here:

Use the More Tag

The more tag is a "continue reading" link that breaks your article into two parts. It allows you to stuff loads of posts on your home page in a neat and ordered manner. This keeps your posts from getting all stretched out on the home page.

Do you guys see any advantage to this SEO wise? Or is it just for aesthetics?

There is only a SEO advantage if you're good at summarising your blog posts - putting all your major keyphrases into the first paragraph. Maybe a slight advantage too when trying to beat the duplicate pages issue on 'slow' blogs....

Hmm, so what's the difference if I have them in the first paragraph as opposed to somewhere further down the blog. So if I didn't use this 'More tag' my keywords would still be in the blog, just not in the first paragraph. So it seems to me that the only reason to use the 'Read More' tag is so you don't have one super duper long blog page. Am I right?

Is there a strategy that goes into writing blogs for SEO purposes besides placing KW within your blog?

one more thing. could you elaborate more on the 'duplicate pages' issue and 'slow' blogs that you mentioned?

duplicate pages are in essense duplicate content. google see's this as a spamming method and will penalize your site if they find too much of the duplicate content on your site.

the other part i don't know. But a guess would be that he meant "slow blogs" are to slow updating and refreshing blogs in the SE's

I meant that a 'slow' blog would only have a couple of (full) posts on the home page. Consequently, very large chunks of the home page would be identical to the inner pages.

Ideally you want your blog home page to rank well for your main keywords (which you put in the first paragraph of each post, before the <!--more--> tag)

Then you can wander off and put the niche-y bits in the rest of the posts, make them rank for the "long tail" search phrases.

I'm not really saying that your blog home page and inner pages will push each other out of the serps (because of a possible duplicate content filter). They'll probably be just fine. It's just that you won't be making optimal use of the possibilities to rank for a wide range of keywords.

Thanks. I agree, I don't think google would see my blog as duplicate content by using this 'read more' tag.

So from what I've gathered, the best way to set up your blog homepage is to just leave the entire post as it is on the homepage.

Um hehe that is just about the opposite of what I was saying, but never mind that. Do what you think looks best - that's the most important thing

Cheers...