Comments or not

How comments work with WordPress.
Love them, hate them, disable them.

With WordPress.org or any blogging platform there is an area where visitors to you site can leave comments on your posts. It is usually found under the post with a form your visitors fill in with their website address, email (which is not published) and their comments.

I think one reason why people may shy away from blogging is because of the dreaded “no comments”. It’s like no body is coming to your party. I don’t get a lot of comments at artbiz or my fine art site. What I found is that if someone wanted more information they emailed or contacted me directly. Some visitors are also not comfortable commenting publicly.

BUT the thing about leaving comments on blogs is that it’s a way to link to your website and we all know how important back links are to your search engine rankings. Before you go out leaving the comment “thanks that was interesting and informative” in hopes of getting people to click-through to your website; stop. Even though it is nice to compliment the author it doesn’t really give people a reason to click-through to your website. You should have something relevant to contribute to the dialogue.  Say something more thought-provoking on the other hand will have people wanting to know who you are and gives them a reason to click-through.

All comments go through an approval process, meaning they are not published to your site until you approve them. With WordPress you can by-pass the approval process for someone who already has an approved comment if you want. WordPress will also notify you by email when someone leaves a comment for approval.

You can expect spam comments so you should have a spam blocker like Akismet (comes standard with WordPress) which will put the comments into a spam box like your email does. Here you can review the spam just incase there is a legit comment and mark it as such.

Whether you allow comments or not on your blog is up to you. You can disable comments on a per post basis by un-checking the Discussion box in the post editor. Or disable them globally in your themes loop.php file by changing true to false on this line of code
?php comments_template( ”, true ); ?

Blogging is about building relationships so don’t be shy leave a comment.