Managing blog comments and analyzing key statistics are important aspects of developing a continuously improving, professional blog. This overview will provide guidance to budding bloggers on the most effective ways to seamlessly manage their content and nurture their internet presence.

Managing WordPress Comments

Legitimate comments that appear on your blog are an important indicator of your blogs effectiveness is communicating a message. Feedback and interactions from blog comments can lead to networking and business opportunities and will increase the credibility of your services and brand. In a similar way, managing the comments marked as spam in a blog is an important, but sometimes over looked task of a blog writer. Reviewing spam comments can help you capture legitimate feedback as well as keep black hat marketers from infecting your domain.

Steps for reviewing blog spam:

1. Scan through all spam marked comments once to quickly delete ones that are obviously spam.
2. Scan the remaining comments to see if the content of the post matches the article where they were posted.
3. Watch for statements that could potentially apply to any article. They are likely spam.
4. If a comment looks legitimate, but you’re not sure if it is spam, copy and paste a portion of the text into a Google search to see if it comes up repeatedly on other blogs.

Analyzing WordPress Statistics

Blog statistics are a valuable source of actionable information. Review you statistics weekly when first starting out and at least every month once your blog is established. The  following overview of the WordPress Statistics Dashboard will help you get started in your quest for web relevance and expanded reach.

Dashboard overview

1. At a glance
   1. This wide top section of the dashboard provides a graphical view of the visits to your blog. Use this information to evaluate viewing trends that will have implications for the best days to post articles. It also provides a quick way to investigate spikes or dips for further evaluation and action.
2. Views by Country
   1. This view shows where people are seeing your blog in the world. This statistic is especially important if you are targeting articles to particular countries or regions of the world.
3. Top Posts & Pages
   1. The default view shows which articles were viewed on the current day and by how many people. Clicking the magnifying glass will show the entire history of view since the article was posted. Viewing the summary data for this section is vital for understanding which articles are most popular and should provide guidance for future topics.
4. Referrers
   1. This statistic provides basic information about how people are finding your blog. If you are trying to increase visibility of blog posts through social media or Google Adwords this will let you know how effective your strategy is. Click on the icons with arrow to show expanded content.
5. Tags & Categories
   1. Categories are indicated by a mini file folder and tags have a mini price tag icon. If you have articles that fall into natural categories it is a best practice to group them in this manner so that you can discover the most popular topics by various subject or keyword groupings.
6. Search engine terms
   1. The search engine terms section is a gold mine of keywords that people are using to find your articles. Use this information to expand keywords and phrases that you may want to consider in article content as well as your business website metatags, on-page content and adwords accounts.
7. Clicks
   1. Hyperlinks that you have included in your article content show up in this section. Links that point back to your own website, social media pages and business partner sites is critical for increasing SEO results. Review the summary section to find out which links people click the most.
8. Totals, followers & shares
   1. This summary statistic is a grouping of key information in a blog including the total number of blog posts you have published, total comments by others on your blog, tags that you have created for posts, total number of blog categories, etc.
9. Comments
   1. This section will give you feedback on the articles that spur the most feedback and interaction among readers. Use this feedback to review the writing style among posts to evaluate what influences followers to engage and comment.

Summaries for each category

Most of the dashboard statistical categories have a link to summarized information that displays extensive historical information. These summaries are important to good blog management.

1. Summary sections provide valuable insight into your content.
2. When reviewing summary information, ask yourself, “How can I use this information to improve?”
3. Consider making a plan to implement one idea that flows from each statistical category of information.

For more information on blog best practices visit my article on “Small Business Blogging Best Practices.“