Comment on SEO Super Comments WordPress Plugin by Erik.

WordPress Blog SEO Comments Great discussion of new ideas for Stallion. I like how Mark hit on the comments enhancements. I think the super comments feature is awesome. I have gotten a good bit of search traffic from that alone (have about 10,000 comments on my site). Great long tail feature.

On the topic of spell checker I definitely agree with SEO Dave on this:

“I think you’ll find few commenter’s worry too much about grammar/spelling and if you tried to make an issue of it you could put some off commenting. The harder it is for someone to make a one off comment less likely they’ll comment in my opinion.”

Hear, hear. I’ll take a misspelled comment over no comment at all.

I think the philosophy here of promoting comments is key to developing a community-type atmosphere which encourages people to come back.

With people taking hits from Google updates I think the community-building and repeat visitors is key to diversifying your traffic (not to mention a community is a lot of fun and it’s pretty cool to engage with people through your site–I’ve really enjoyed getting to know my site regulars, lot of good people).

To that end, I had a few ideas to maybe enhance the comments and community experience.

1) Ability to rank/like comments?

2) Ability to use your own customized default gravatar?

3) Numbered comments for easier reference?

4) Commenter profile page feature?

5) “Top commenter” badges?

6) ???

I think all these ideas could help personalize the experience, promote interaction, and encourage people to be invested in the site and thus return. I think the comments aspect is great as it is on Stallion but could be leveraged a lot more, maybe by using some of these ideas.

And I think this could potentially have more impact than even social media additions and enhancements. I’d rather build a community on my own site than on another (though I have found Facebook a good way to give users access to my content and of course these tools can help feed traffic to your site, so good to have).

Thanks for all the work and for making the effort to get ideas from your users. Just my two cents here, I have an Amish site so maybe I just naturally think “community” ;)