To generate interest in your blog, what you is to maximize interactions with your readers through their comments. Most of your visitors will simply leave a message. You should read the comments and respond to any questions there in, or just join the conversation.

In addition, authors of other blogs can leave comments without even visiting the blog! These are called “pingbacks” or “trackbacks”, and they basically inform other bloggers whenever they cite an article from another site in their own articles. This means tht online conversations are painless among various site users and websites.

Managing Comments

Sometimes you will get weird comments and you may need to moderate and manage comments and deal with the annoying trend in “comment spam”, when unwanted comments are posted to your blog.

We’ve set the system on WildlifeDirect to hold in moderation any comment with more than 1 URL. These comments are highlighted in the dashboard and you can check them and delete the spam and approve any genuine

Trackbacks

TrackBack provides notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, “This is something you may be interested in.” To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B. A better explanation is this:

Person A writes something on their blog.

Person B wants to comment on Person A’s blog, but wants her own readers to see what she had to say, and be able to comment on her own blog

Person B posts on her own blog and sends a trackback to Person A’s blog

Person A’s blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post. This comment contains a link to Person B’s post Most trackbacks send to Person A only a small portion (called an “excerpt”) of what Person B had to say. This is meant to act as a “teaser”, letting Person A (and his readers) see some of what Person B had to say, and encouraging them all to click over to Person B’s site to read the rest (and possibly comment).

Person B’s trackback to Person A’s blog gets posted along with all the comments.

Pingbacks 

These are similar to trackbacks but do not contain any content. The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments: A Pingback is another type of Linkback, or methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. Wordpress have automatic ones so that all the links included in a blog post can be pinged when it is published to related links . You can learn more about trackbacks and pingbacks here

If you are like me, you were given a password but your brain can’t fathom it and so you set your computer to remember it. Easy right. Dangerous I promise.  You have to change it to something you’ll always remember. I’ll tell you why.

Many of us stick with the random password we’re given when we start a new blog and since it’s an impossible string of numbers and letters, we choose the easy option and tell the computer to ‘remember me’. This can be fatal if you are traveling need to upload a post from an internet café or someone else’s computer which happens if there’s some breaking news you need to relay when you computer is back at the office. You don’t have to wait just because you don’t remember your password.

 This is important guys because it can be maddening to your readers when stand them up, you don’t show up, don’t post for a while. Don’t underestimate how annoyed and rebellious your readers will get if you change your posting frequency or abandon your blog for a few weeks. And for you it means starting from scratch and building up the readership all over again when you get back. Why bother when there’s an easy solution?  Just change your password to something you will always remember.

To change your password to something you will remember log in as normal, login as usual, go to Manage and Password options, type in your new password twice in the boxes and upload the changes. Hey Presto it’s done! Now you will have no problem posting from anywhere.

For those with a wildlifedirect.org blog, if you can’t remember your wildlifedirect password and can’t login – just email us on partnerships@wildlifedirect.org and we will immediately change your password for you from our end.

Comments are a critical means of having that important conversation with your visitors. You need to mange the comments in your blog to avoid receiving spam or hate mail.

Bloggers have several options for setting the way comments are to be handled and whether they should be moderated or not (that means whether they should be approved by the blog owner or not).

At WildlifeDirect we set all blogs not to be moderated unless a commentator attempts to leave 2 or more links. This is just one mechanism to prevent spam (we also have other tools). However, you might still have a valid commentator trying to leave more than 2 links because they have some important contribution to a conversation.

You need to monitor these comments which will not appear on the blog, but can be viewed and approved in the back end.

To do this simply log in and look at the right hand side of the dashboard. It will give you information on latest comments. Look at whether there are any comments in moderation. If there are comments in moderation, go to Comments and click on Awaiting moderation. This will allow you to approve, or delete any comment. It’s a good practice to clear your comments in moderation every week or so.

If you are getting comments that are disturbing, hate mail or that kind of thing, or just plain rubbish, you can turn on the moderation by going to Options, and then click on Discussion – here you can change various settings

To make it easy for you to track what’s happening I recommend you try the following settings which will minimize your need to actively manage or moderate

Usual settings for an article:
(These settings may be overridden for individual articles.)

• Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.)
• Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)
• Allow people to post comments on the article

If you want people to find your blog, you will need it to appear in search engines. For those with WildlifeDirect.org blogs ,search engine optimization (SEO) is handled by WildlifeDirect through Google.

A key to generating traffic is to have your site appear high up in search engine results for relevant searches. Ideally, this means appearing on the first page of search results, but showing up in the first three pages is pretty good. (Most searchers don’t venture past Page 3 of search results.)

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the art of getting your site noticed by search engines so it is listed more frequently and ranked higher in “organic” (unpaid) search results. When users search for “lions” for example, you want them to quickly find your site on the subject of lions conservation.

The most important part of SEO are keyword phrases. Choosing a keyword phrase for each page on your blog is an essential part of SEO. Before you start writing a blog entry, think about what you’re going to be writing about. Then think about what you would type into a search engine to find what you’ll be writing about. While you’re writing your blog entry, make sure to include the search phrase in your entry, several times at least. Use the same keyword phrase in the title of the page and at lease twice in the first paragraph.

Use these keywords in your title and enter them into the ‘tags’ section. Use keywords and phrases that refer to your post – they should be words or phrases that people may use to search for your blog entry.