Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [206]
Figure 17-8: A tag cloud can provide helpful topics. But unmanaged, it can become a jumbled mess of words that don’t help your visitors.
Comments
What makes blogs such a foundational part of social media is the ability for readers of the blog to make comments. Although some businesses shudder at the thought of comments being made on the blog by anybody, it is a valuable contribution and a great ability to have a managed conversation about specific points.
All blog software comes with the ability to manage the comments that are being made on the blog (Figure 17-9). Comments ultimately have to be approved by the site manager. Most bloggers like to review all the comments by hand prior to approving them or deleting them. You also have the option of first approval. If an comment is made and approved, the comment author is then free to add additional comments without review. The settings you choose must be the ones you are most comfortable with. It is up to the company to develop a policy for managing and approving comments.
Figure 17-9: WordPress comment administration screen
The worst thing a blog can have is unregulated comments on the blog, because it makes it appear as though the manager or owner is unaware of the comments being made on the blog or has unwanted links showing up in the comments.
Managing the comments on an active blog can be a time-consuming process. However, the time spent screening irrelevant, “spammy,” or link-dropping comments will only increase the relevance and quality of the comments for your readers. Link dropping is the practice many sites use to build their links by making very general comments that look harmless, but they are relying on the harmless comment to be approved, thereby providing a link to their site with the context of anchor text instead of their real name.
Approving comments builds your credibility, especially when you allow comments that might be critical and address them in a follow-up comment. However, critical comments that contain language that you do not approve of are fine to delete. I recommend adding comment guidelines to your website that make it very clear that any comments with profane language, insulting other commenters, or blatantly dropping a link instead of a real name will be deleted (yes, I delete comments that are using anchor text instead of a real name). You are the site owner, so it is your prerogative, and you make the rules.
One particular comment spam plug-in (a program that is made to “plug in” to a parent program, like WordPress) is Akismet, which is included with WordPress. With Akismet, you create an account, and all comments are reviewed by the Akismet server, which helps eliminate hundreds to thousands of spammy comments. If one does get through the Akismet review, you can mark it as spam, and Akismet will “learn” to eliminate similar comments in the future.
Permalinks
Permalinks can be controlled by the blog author to reflect a more friendly URL. This is the ability to create a URL rewrite in your blog (remember Chapter 14?). Although a rewrite is somewhat complicated for a large database-driven website, blog software such as WordPress makes it easy for anyone to create clear, contextual URLs.
When you’re setting up a WordPress blog, I recommend setting up permalinks as one of the first tasks. The Permalinks link is located under Settings. On the permalinks setup screen, the interface presents a very clear understanding of how this software is so powerful in the hands of nontechnical publishers. The owner or manager of the blog can customize the URL structure setup exactly how they would like it to appear (Figure 17-10).
Figure 17-10: The URL structure of permalinks