Comments subscription

Comment subscription is a great thing for those readers that are interested in the comments on a specific post. What it does basically is letting the subscriber know when a new comment has been published. If he subscribed to it there is a big chance that he is interested in a discussion and will probably leave a comment.

DoFollow links in comments

DoFollow is simply an internet slang term given to web pages or sites that are not utilizing NoFollow. NoFollow is a hyperlink inclusion that tells search engines not to pass on any credibility or influence to an outbound link.
squidoo.com

Since WordPress is automatically adding rel=”nofollow” to links inside comments you will need to use a plugin or a “hack” to remove it. Bellow you can find some links to articles, plugins and hacks to achieve this.

Implement CommentLUV


Screenshot taken from 1stWebDesigner.com

CommentLUV is a great way to give something back to commentators that have a blog and encourage them to comment. What it actually does is show the comment author’s latest blog post in his comment.

Show a link to their twitter account

This is quite rare but very nice way to encourage commenting. If the comment author has a twitter account he can leave the username when commenting and a link to his twitter account will be shown in the comment.

Showing top comment authors

Showing top comment authors (the ones that posted most comments) and a link to their website in the sidebar (or somewhere else you might think it’s better) is a great way to encourage your visitors to comment.

Keeping those links as “doFollow” will be even more encouraging but it’s not a must.

Allow threaded comments


Above screenshot taken from CSS-Tricks.

Great way to engage users in a conversation is by using threaded comments. This allows your visitors to reply to some comment and that reply will be shown directly bellow that specific comment. Before this was possible we have been using “@” to refer to a specific commenter, which wasn’t that useful because all the comments are shown chronologically.

The comment form

Between a visitor and his comment is a comment form, and it’s very well known that unattractive and messy forms can discourage form completion (in this case the comment form).

Another thing that can turn your visitors away from commenting is CAPTCHA. I know there are a lot of spam comments, but akismet is a godsent plugin that stands between spam and you. Yes, once in a while a spam comment will get past it but it’s better to send a comment to spam once in a while then suffer decrease in real comments due to captcha.

Engage in conversation

Another great way to encourage conversation is to be a part of it. Reply to the comments with your own opinion, not to every single comment but to the ones that you think that you can say something worthy.

The logical

There are some logical ways to encourage your visitors to comment and i don’t want to place them all as separate ways because i hate when i am reading for example an article about ways for increasing traffic and see that most of them are simply logical and everybody knows it (example “content is king”).

  • Write about interesting and popular subjects
  • Ask your visitors a question related to the subject
  • Offer some kind of a reward to the most interesting comments
  • Don’t require your visitors to be registered to comment
  • Highlight interesting comments

Final words

Hope you found this article useful and if you know some more cool ways say so in the comments and i’ll be happy to update this article and of course mention you with a link to your website.

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