Top of the morning to you all, isn’t it a excellent day? I got an email yesterday to give me great news. My daughter and grand daughter are coming for a visit! Not a long one unfortunately. It’s only for a week. However, I really enjoy their visits. That little minx’s Megan can twist me around her little finger. Don’t tell her I said that, or I will have no peace. Her mother says I spoil her. Well maybe I do. However, she really is a light in my life. Not that I don’t love my daughter mind, and she knows it. However, that little charmer really can do no wrong in my eyes. We will see the mischief she can get up to in these few days. She always does. So I am really plugged into what she will be going to do. On that subject let us discuss if you have got the plug-ins that are really essential to your well being on WordPress.

1. Do you have the All in One?

WordPress has a very good SEO Plug-in which I recommend that you download and start using right away. This makes you ready for those little spiders that come along from the search engines. You want to be found don’t you? You need both found but to climb the rankings as fast as possible to make you appear on the front page when some places a search for the subject you were looking for. Statistics show that the first ranked site gets most of the clicks. And if you don’t appear on the first page instead of getting many visits you might get one to three million. I know there are millions of searches a day, but you want your pearls of wisdom to appear on someone’s screen.

2. Dynamic or Static?

You really need to turn your web pages static rather than letting them stay dynamic. So many more people will be able to real them and load them faster. For this you will need WordPress Super Cache plug-in.

3. Google Your Website

With the percentage of people who use Google as their search engine, (It was 83% overall when I last looked.) Google has taken control of the web. It would be foolish to dismiss this and not make your website Google happy. Give them a sitemap. They use this to search through your blog to pick up topics of interest and place them on the web. It is very important for your visibility on the internet to have those spiders crawl through, and you want the free access to lead from one page to the other and back again with easy. They also need to know when a new comment is made so they can return and check this for fresh content.

4. Are Your Comments, Spam?

You do not want to appear to be making comments that are spam. No sensible person would. This plug-in check to see if the comments you make to see if they appear as if they are spam. This will check through your comments and tell you the result.

5. Do You Keep A Copy?

Keeping a backup of your work is extremely important if you want to retain all your hard labour. Image if one morning you came along and discovered the site had been hacked, and all your hard labour was gone? It would take you hours to replace it if not days. It all disappeared with some mean person just to play games with you. We don’t want that, so we need to make backups.

Well, folks the garden is calling, so I will leave you to get busy downloading and setting those up, if you haven’t already. I will be back…..

Spam, has been described as the scourge of the web, and with good reason. This self serving, irrelevant junk has no place in society, and especially not on your blog. Though WordPress has many methods of dealing with spam, there are still downsides to receiving spam that you may not have thought about.

That being the case, here are some tips for reducing spam comments in WordPress.

Even though you may have several methods in place for catching spam comments in your theme, they are still there, living in your database. This means that your database being used to store junk. Think about it as part of your living room where you stack junk mail, and then you are getting the idea.

Another downside, is that good comments get mixed up with all of this, as they can be accidentally marked as spam, and subsequently, they loose their chance to be seen on your blog. These comments could have enhanced your blog, and encouraged debate, but they simply never got the chance. These blogs are known as false positives in the business.

You could argue that if Askimet, or another technique is successful in stopping spam appearing on a site, and that is all you care about, then there is no problem, but remember you could miss the false positive comments, and they could have done wonders for your blog.

Pre WordPress 2.7, there was a plug-in called “close old posts”, and this feature simply closed trackbacks and comments, after a set number of days. This plug-in has been built into 2.7, but in all likelihood not switched on.

To switch it on, log into WordPress admin page, and select the settings option. From this select discussion, and when you are brought to the comments settings page, select other comment settings, which is the second section on the page. From this option choose automatically close comments after xx days. Obviously select the amount of days you want the comments open for. The default is 14.

This is a good option, as spammers normally target posts that are older. By using this option you will give enough time for people to read and comment on a post, and so the post still gets its shot at glory, and the spammers get disappointed.

Another good tip for reducing spam comments in WordPress, is to use a CAPTCHA. Though some find this feature frustratingly annoying, it is a good anti-spam tool. It is also useful if you do not wish to set, or unable to set, the automatically close comments after xx days option.

There is a debate whether CAPTCHAs are accessible are not. We have all used ones where the letters and numbers that you have to type in, to validate a login or a function on a website, are simply undecipherable, so the rule here is to use one that can be read. Also, bear in mind that your readers will find this annoying.

Another tip for reducing spam comments in WordPress, is to use the trackback validation plug-in. This gizmo will check to see if the blog that has sent you a trackback/pingback, has actually linked to your blog, or is just pretending. If it is found to be invalid, the trackback is sent to the moderation queue, or deleted automatically.

Though these tips on reducing spam comments in WordPress, will not completely stop spam comments coming through, at least your database will be less cluttered, and false positive comments have a fair chance of seeing the light of day. Remember, that the less spam you have, the better and smoother your blog will run.