Allowing your visitors to comment on your WordPress blog is a great way to encourage interaction and repeat traffic. With the use of the Akismet comment spam plugin, or your favorite comment spam plugin. And The Subscribe To Comments plugin, you can allow comments with very little moderation on your part. This short WordPress Guide will provide you with a balance of allowing comments without letting them over run your WordPress Blog.

Notifying other blogs you link to in your posts usually show as a comment on the blog post you referenced in the link. This is known as a Trackback and will provide a link on the other blog back to yours. I suggest this option is checked.

The next option, Allow link notifications… will notify you when other blogs link to a post on your blog, its always nice to see these and to know others find your content good enough to share with others so check it.

And since this is all about an interactive blog you definitely want to check Allow people to post comments on the article.

Both of the Email me whenever notifications boxes should be checked at least to start so you can monitor comments. If you find it overwhelming your inbox you can always change these options.

In the Before a comment appears section, I suggest just check the box, “Comment author must fill out name and e-mail”. Remember we want to encourage comments and the comment authors want to see their comments posted immediately. Holding a comment for moderation may discourage future comments and bog you down approving every comment.

There are software programs that automate blog comments that basically spam your blog, plastering their links on your posts. A common characteristic of comment spam has multiple links within it. This is where the Akismet plugin comes to the rescue, however if you find some getting through you can hold comments with specific words in them in the Comment Moderation box or add them to the Comment Blacklist in the bottom two boxes shown below.

Allowing others to comment on your WordPress blog posts is a great way to gain repeat traffic. Used in conjunction with the Subscribe To Comments plugin, that allows comment authors to subscribe to the comments on the post. They will be notified of any new comments and will come back to read more.

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