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What Is A Table Of Contents
As you can see from what I have included here, a table of contents (TOC) is just that, a list of what is in your post. However, it is not just any list. This list is created through the use of header (H) tags. Header tags have a range of H1 through to H6 – you can always find that one of those tags will suit your theme. The title of each section in this post is published using the H4 tag. This has been done in the past using anchors and hand coding the TOC – not any more!
Why A Table Of Contents
Generally speaking, you probably don’t need a TOC in a majority of posts. However, if you have a particularly long post then you should divide it into sections. For SEO purposes, each section should have a heading using a header tag.
There is another benefit to using a TOC. People like to scan a post before reading. With a TOC, they can scan the post above the fold. Add to that, if you check my TOC, by clicking on one of the titles in the list, the cursor will jump to that section. That’s pretty handy for your readers.
How To Create A Table Of Contents
To create a TOC in WordPress, you will first need to install a plugin. Table of Contents Generator WordPress plugin is the one I am using here and these instructions cover this particular plugin. If you do a search there are others around.
Once the plugin is installed and activated, create your post. The TOC is generated from the use of header tags so include a couple of header tags throughout your post.
Once you have completed your post, place the cursor at a point where you want the TOC generated and use the (!–TOC–) command – note, replace the ( ) with < > symbols.
And there Any SEO Benefits Too
It seems there may be SEO benefits with Google taking on page navigation links as mini site links. Site links or internal links help the search engines find your content. For on page navigation, what you could be building is a set of long tail keywords – one for each heading in the TOC.
My thanks to Ann Smarty on Search Engine Journal for her post titled “how to add intra-page navigation to your blog posts“.
@Les: I believe TOC will be useful for long posts when you can organize the post in different section. I would like to have named anchors (#sectionname) etc. in the article to make the TOC usable. Without the named anchors the table of contents is nothing but a tool that helps people ‘scan’ the contents.
It’s an interesting plug-in though, because you can have a lot of long tail keyword anchor text for your page. Though it has not been proven how good self-reference links can be.