Photo author: mollyeh11

Assuming your blog has more than one page of posts you’re going to have some links at the bottom of each page reading to navigate to older posts or to newer ones. They are an essential part of your blog’s navigation and can be useful when trying to keep a visitor on for more.

I have seen my share of instances when those links read something like “Next” and “Previous”, or something similar, which can be pretty confusing at times for the reader. As an example, Josh is reading page 4 of your post index. He worked his way down from the 1st page, trying to take in all the useful info he can get from your blog. He reached the end of page 4 and wants to go to page 5, but isn’t sure any more which link to click,”Next” or “Previous”… he clicks the wrong one and ends up on page 3. Of course, this is frustrating for Josh. Now he’d have to go back to page 4 and click the other link to get wher he wanted to be.

Many times the Joshes reading your posts simply decide it’s not worth it and simply leave, to find the information they need elsewhere. You just lost a few potential page views. Want to avoid that? Of course…

It’s real easy to fix this and ensure Josh stays on longer, since all you have to do is rewrite the anchor text for these links, which is template-controlled.

All you need to do is go to your WordPress Dashboard and pick the Presentation > Theme editor page. You’ll be editing the “Main Index Template”, so select that from the list on the right.

Find the line reading:

<div id=”more_reading”>

Just below that is the line you’ll need to edit. Replace the line with something like:

<p><?php next_posts_link(’Older Posts’) ?>, <?php previous_posts_link(’Newer Posts’) ?></p>

I used ‘Older Posts’ and ‘Newer Posts’ because it leaves absolutely no room for confusion.

It’s that simple. No more frustration for your users, more pageviews for you. All in under 5 minutes.