When working on a WordPress blog you tend to spend a lot of time writing your blogs.  If the blog is part of a larger web site you also have to focus on those pages.  However, comments are the part of your site where you visitors can participate.  Like Facebook. MySpace and Twitter have shown - participation leads to more traffic.

Here are some great plugin ideas.  Some are designed to help you encourage valuable discussion.  Others are designed to help you keep the administrative burden low because untamed comments can get out of control!

1. Encourage and reward participation by other bloggers
BlogFollow is a WordPress plugin that shows a snippet from a commentator’s blog at the bottom on their comment.  The purpose of this is to encourage user participation in your blog.  When I leave a comment, I can also leave an excerpt from my blog.  Both parties win.

2. Discourage Spam
Akismet - Antispam plugin from the creators of Wordpress that uses a central database of spam comments to flag spam. Quite simply, don’t leave home without it.  You will have to register at Wordpress.com to get a free API key. Once you have the key, you can use it on all WordPress and even Drupal sites that you manage.

3. Follow Your Leaders!
NoFollow Free is another plugin that will encourage comments.  This Wordpress plugin remove the “nofollow” attribute from your Wordpress blog’s comments and/or from the comments text links.  When you allow the follow, the commentator gets search credit for the links from your site to their site.  You have options to replace the nofollow only when the author has posted X comments and put back the nofollow when some blacklisted words are matched. The replacement of the nofollow can also be based on the users type (registered and visitor users).

4. Old posts need no comments
Comment Timeout closes comments on old posts on your blog. It takes into account ongoing discussions by allowing you to keep comments open for longer if you have recently had any comments.  The reason for this is that in 99% of the cases comments on old blogs are spam.

5. Highlight key comments
Comment Highlighter allows you to add style to comments based on the email of the comment author, the name or the URL.  Thus comments of different people can be highlighted.  For example, comments by the blog writer can be in one color; comments by registered users can have the subject line highlighted and so on.

6. Commenters want to get the last word in
Subscribe to comments is great plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries.  So, if anybody comments on my comment - I get emailed so I know to come back to the site (more traffic) and follow-up.  The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address.  Almost 160,000 downloads from WordPress (at press time) - one of the most popular plugins!

7. Show visitors related content
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. So, for example, if the user is commenting on your blog post on “Top WordPress Plugins to Encourage Comments” you can highlight that you have another blog post on WordPress and Social Media Plugins.

So pick out the plugins that make the most sense for your blog and try them out.  Having unused plugins can only slow down your site.  So keep them if you use them - but if they are not for you then be sure to delete them in favor of the ones you enjoy having on your site!

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