Hi Digital people, I am looking at using blogging on my site to increase rankings, to get repeat visitors, Ideally it will also allow me to talk about my dog walking experiences. Blogging can do all of these things, but I am using Joomla and not sure of whether the default module for blogging works well enough. Sure i can use it, but i dont want to do a few months then have to convert to something that really works well. The major question I have is whether to allow comments or not. If I allow comments I might get more visitors, but they might just be spammers looking to put their URL up. And I will have to moderate yes? If i dont allow comments, I may not get any repeat visitors ... Does anyone have a view on how to manage blogging from an seo point of view? Many Thanks ...
Yes. Comments are good... Web viewers like to know other people are interested in your site as well, and they like to interact. The more interactive the visitors can become on your site, the better it is for your seo in the long run. It can also potentially help your targeted keywords expand on each page in a distinctive way. Wordpress has spam blockers that are pretty effective, and you're able to easily moderate/approve everything that is not tagged as spam before it's posted. I presume joomla is going to be about the same as Wordpress.
In my personal opinion you should go for "top commentator widget". Example: http://www.quicksprout.com/
Comments certainly help from a SEO perspective because they add more relevant content on your site, usually with your keywords but you certainly have to moderate them in order to avoid spam, there are many plugins that work like the spam folder on your email account and can certainly save you time...
Blogging is good for to increase traffic on your keyword and if you think you will get 100% organic and targeted customer that need to think......But definitely you can average customer and after your rank is good on Search Engine it will very helpful to hit your target.
Some commenting plugins will require the visitors to login (i.e. via Facebook) or leave a name, or fill in a captcha, etc. This type of requirement will cut down on the # of comments you get but it will filter out a lot of the junk posts too & keep your comments more on topic. What you do will depend too on the type of community you're targeting w/your niche. If your users are active, talkative, passionate - then you'll probably get some great content by allowing comments.
Hi Epic, thanks for the genuine comment. I guess you can see even from this thread that there are 'spammers' everywhere. What I have found so far is that about half of the people seem to not allow comments and others recommend really good filters. My community will be people with dogs, and hopefully a good extension will build a customer base for me too - as anyone in here is here to make money right? Looks like I will have to find a good joomla extension and just trial it on one of my sites?