Fairy Blog Mother
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All you need to know about comments, and how to manage them.
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Click here for a pdf
Click on the button to download a pdf of this page.
First, a glossary (important = read it to understand this e-course fully):
Post = an entry, article, piece of writing or message in your blog.
Dashboard = main menu or hub of a blog which provides access to the various elements.
WordPress.com = the recommended blog programme software provider I’m using for ‘free’ blogs.
Internet Spiders = robots that search the internet looking for keywords and new material to help with SEO.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) = improving organic or natural search engine results using spiders.
Interaction = the ability to contribute or comment on the internet via blogs and forums.
Keywords (Tags) = words that are currently being searched for in search engines and are therefore attractive to internet spiders.
Categories = archived topic pages to store posts for research or retrieval purposes.
Link = an interactive method of getting to another website or blog.
Spam = unwanted comments or emails, usually of a malicious nature.
Widget = blogging programme or application for the blog’s sidebar.
Let’s assume you’ve already written a post (find out how from my visual e-course ‘Writing Posts’).
Once your post has been published, your post’s individual page (accessed by clicking on the headline) will look like the picture:
Note that WordPress has given you an area at the bottom of the post for your readers to write a comment.
Internet spiders enjoy comments because they are usually accompanied by links to other blogs or websites provided by the contributors (which act as gateways for spider access), and they view comments as new material with the same value as posts. You should encourage comments because they provide valuable feedback (as long as they’re not spam, but you can moderate/supervise that) and lots of comments will also induce you to write more posts.
So, let’s create a comment ourselves (there’s no reason why you can’t comment on your own posts – they could be seen as postscripts).
Normally there will be fields for the commenter’s name, email and website/blog address, but as soon as WordPress has registered who you are, they do all that for you automatically.
And once you press ‘Submit Comment’ it will look like this:
And it will show up underneath your post and in the comments widget in the right sidebar:
You can edit any comments you receive to take out waffle or correct mistakes, go to ‘Comments’ in the left sidebar in the dashboard (find out how to access the dashboard from ‘Accessing your blog’):
And if you mouse over the comment the quick links Unapprove | Spam | Delete | Edit | Quick Edit | Reply show up. If you want to edit the comment (to remove certain paragraphs or correct spellings), this page shows up:
Where you can see not only can you change the comment content, but also who it’s from and their details. Don’t forget to click ‘Update Comment’ when you’ve finished.
If you’ve set up the Administrator to moderate any comments before they’re posted, WordPress will automatically email you for your approval.
If you go back to the dashboard you can see a taster of your latest comment:
Note it says you have 1 spam. If you click on the red word ‘spam’ you get this page:
And you can decide whether it is spam or not, and treat it accordingly. This is actually a ‘ping-back’ to another blog, which doesn’t look very relevant to your cause. We will delete it (if you mouse over the comment the quick links appear, of which one is Delete; alternatively, click on the box next to the post’s headline ‘It’s easy to set up a blog’ and select ‘delete’ from the bulk actions menu above, and then click ‘Apply’).
If you want to find out more about how to create a successful blog, view my other blogging visual e-courses.
© Alice Elliott 2009
