The comment section on your WordPress posts does matter for SEO. A
good comments section can make your site more interesting and, in the
best cases, your users will increase the quality of your content by
offering intelligent comments.
Sometimes, they’ll even include links that enhance the usefulness of
your posts for readers and that can be a very good thing. Not only are
they making your site more useful, they’re also allowing you to skip the
work of finding more links to include!
Managing Your Comments
On most premium wordpress themes,
there will be features built into the admin panel that allow you to
control how your contents are handled. Make sure you set this up so that
you have to approve all comments before they are posted. Not doing so
is inviting spammers and trolls into your comments section. Either of
these nuisances can lower the quality of your site very quickly and end
up driving your visitors away.
To set this up manually, go to Settings and then select the
Discussions subpanel. Set your option so that an administrator has to
approve comments. This is the most labor-intensive way to manage your
comments but, as is the case with most things in life, a little bit of
work goes a long way toward building something worthwhile.
This is the most basic part of handling comments on your WordPress
site. There is much more to all of this than just requiring approval on
your comments, however. Today’s web is all about users interacting with
one another and there are some great strategies that you can employ to
take advantage of this trend and to increase the search engine
visibility of your site.
To Interact or Not?
Some blog owners choose not to participate in the comments section of
their sites. Sometimes, they do so to cultivate something of a
celebrity status. Being too available tends to be at cross purposes to
coming off as “someone” on the web, but you may be shooting yourself in
the foot with this strategy.
Interacting with your commenters allows you to develop a rapport with
them and encourages them to come back. It also can have the effect of
getting you word of mouth and link sharing advertising, which can both
drive traffic to your site.
The more you engage with your users, the more likely they are to add
more useful information to your comments section, which makes your site
more interesting to the search engines overall.
There is another strategy that you can use to greatly expand upon the SEO value of a post, as well.
Personal to Public
Provided the user in question is okay with it, make sure to publish
interesting comments that are relevant to a post and that are sent to
you personally to your blog. Some commentators in the media have adopted
this strategy and it has the effect of creating a sort of letters to
the editor section.
If you were around in the days of print newspapers, you’ll remember
that people loved the letters to the editor section. It provides an
opportunity for intelligent debate and publishing these letters can end
up generating as lot of quality content for your site, for free! Just
remember to let the readers know that emails and other personal forms of
contact may end up being publicized on your blog to avoid anyone being
angry.
WordPress has roots that run deep into the social web. Be sure you
take advantage of this. Engage your audience, don’t be aloof and you’ll
likely be rewarded with content that could boost your blog’s search
engine visibility in meaningful ways!
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