5 WordPress plugins to get more comments on your blog

CommentLuv (sometimes known as ComLuv) is a plugin which displays the title of your visitors' most recent blog post alongside their comments. This is how it works: when a visitor posts a comment on your blog and inserts a link to their homepage in the Website field, the CommentLuv plugin will attempt to find their most recent blog entry via their RSS feed. When the user submits their comment, a link to their most recent blog entry will be displayed alongside their comment. The idea of this is that other visitors will be more likely to visit the commenter's blog as they will be able to see at a glance what it is all about. This in turn will make it more likely that people will comment on your blog, as they will get more hits on their own site.

By default, all WordPress blogs use the No Follow attribute for any links that users put in their comments (including those in the Website field). What this means is that those links won't be counted by search engines when they are calculating page ranks. However, if you install the DoFollow plugin, your blog will automatically start using the Do Follow attribute for users' links. Your users' links will then be counted by the search engines. If you publicise the fact that your blog uses the Do Follow attribute, users will be more likely to leave comments on your blog, as they will get a search engine-friendly link back to their own site in return.

Top Commentators Widget is a simple plugin that enables you to display a list of your blog's top commenters in the sidebar or footer. If the user fills in their website address when making a comment, then their name will be linked back to their blog. The widget has several customisation options; for example you can specify how many names will appear, whether to show the number of comments in brackets etc.

Some WordPress themes already come with a Recent Comments Widget, but if not, you can try this one. It is a sidebar widget similar to the Top Commentators Widget, which displays links to the most recent comments on your blog, along with a link back to the commenter's site. You can specify how many comments to display - I find that 5 is a good number.

Live Comment Preview displays a preview of the user's comment as they are typing! It's very easy to use - all you have to do is install and activate it; there are no settings to worry about. This can be particularly useful on blogs which discuss programming techniques, as users will be able to see if their code tags will show up correctly before submitting their comment.

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