Creating Blogger Jumpbreaks

The most important factor to using Jump Breaks is being aware that you need to write content which will engage the interest of the reader and state the overall purpose of the entire article within the first paragraph. Blogger Jump Breaks should display the smallest amount of text possible and still achieve this goal. Unless a post is extremely short in nature and is no more than two very short paragraphs, a Jump Break will almost always be of benefit. Jump Breaks can increase your blog traffic and PageRank, and will also usually make your blog pages load much faster.

Your first paragraph should be a basic summary of intent and content only, and not contain any hard reference or informational material. The reason for this is that when the reader clicks the Jump Break text it will navigate them to the individual post page, with the screen already scrolled down to the next section to be read. If you have put necessary information or links within the first paragraph, the reader will then have to scroll back up to view it. This is not only inconvenient to the reader; it is also a good reason for keeping the amount of content prior to the Jump Break as small as possible. Make sure that you make good use of keywords in the Jump Break paragraph so you do not lose out on good results from search engines.

Is it worthwhile to go back and add Jump Breaks to old blog posts, or convert the older format of “Read More” to the current Jump Break format? In my opinion, yes it is. If you already have a blog with a lot of posts and have never before used a Jump Break, don’t be discouraged. Once you become familiar with how to create them, adding them to new posts will soon become second nature. They are extremely fast and simple to make, so updating old posts with them would not be an overwhelming task if you simply did a small batch of the old posts each time you posted a new one until they were all completed. Doing so will give a more uniform look and feel to your blog posts.

Jump Breaks also have two distinctive advantages over the former “Read More” format. The “Read More” process required the publisher to add extra HTML to the blog for each post using the feature. Over time, this can seriously slow down the speed your blog loads at, because it is processing tons of additional code. Removing this code will not only speed up loading, it will make any editing you later need to do to your code easier because there will be less stuff cluttering it up. This can be a huge benefit for people who are not overly familiar with dealing with HTML codes regularly. Don’t forget when editing old posts to always test by viewing them before moving on after making changes. The purpose of updating is to make your old posts more effective, not to break or mess them up somehow.

The old “Read More” code method also placed the break in the texts where it wanted to, based on length. This would often occur at awkward and annoying points in the text, which is another good argument for converting posts using that format to Jump Breaks. Jump Breaks allow the writer the freedom to place the break in the text any place they want to, which allows for much greater flexibility and readability in posts.

How To Add A Jump Break To Your Blog

1. Write a new post or open an existing post to edit, in Compose mode
2. Decide where you want the Jump Break to be placed and place your cursor there
3. Click the Jump Break icon on the Compose post toolbar, which looks like a page torn in half
4. Save your post
5. View post to make sure it looks the way you want it to look
6. If not, repeat steps 2-5 until happy with the results