How to Make Blog Post Comments Searchable in WordPress | EP 804

How to Make Blog Post Comments Searchable in WordPress

1. https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-make-blog-post-comments-searchable-in-wordpress/  02:20

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 David Blackmon: Welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast, my name is David Blackmon.

00:35 Tim Strifler: And i’m Tim Strifler

00:38 David Blackmon: Today in episode 804 we’re going to talk about how to make blog post comments searchable in WordPress. I guess the first question might be why would you even want to do something like that, and obviously the more content that you have on your site, the search engines tend to really like that. There’s a couple of things, factors that go into search engine algorithms where this kind of hits on um content. Obviously any text the more of it that you have so if you’ve got a a lively comment section on your blog post and and people are engaged, that’s huge for search engines. You know, on the content side of things the engagement is another factor that triggers google’s algorithm and stuff. So if you have a lively blog with lots of comments you know that helps you know that makes google think that your content is is maybe better than someone else’s, because a lot of people are interacting with it. So Tim i don’t want to steal your thunder either because he’s going to talk about how you’re going to technically get it done, but why you want it done is so that the search engine can find you and you’re hitting on several of the algorithms engagement, you know size of of content. Um am i missing anything else?

02:02 Tim Strifler: No, and i think just for for users ability to find stuff too. Especially like if you have a blog where there’s a lot of um first of all a lot of engagement a lot of people commenting, but especially if it’s of the technical nature where people are posting, um you know answers or suggestions or different things, fixes you want your users to be able to find that too. And so there’s a way to do it so users can search not just your blog content or your custom posts and pages but also the comments within that too, because by default the WordPress search won’t include comments that people make. When you’re searching something. And so by using a custom search tool and actually the one that we recommend that is made for this is called Search WP. And so Search WP is a super powerful custom search solution for WordPress that gives you the ability to search not just comments but also content within custom fields, meta boxes things like that. So super super powerful. So now if your users are trying to find an answer maybe you don’t specifically answer it in your blog post but a user has commented the answer, well now they’ll be able to find it using the search which can be really really powerful. So yeah super simple, that the plug-in uh installs pretty easily um and so yeah definitely check it out. It is a premium solution um and so it’s not something you’re going to want to put on every single website, but you’re not going to need it on every single website either. So the websites where you have a lot of content and you want those comments to be searchable. Um then then you can do that with uh with this plugin and it’s worth spending the money in that case.

04:01 David Blackmon: Absolutely. All right, tomorrow we’ve got another great topic, uh how to back up your WordPress website to google drive for free and easy. Until tomorrow we’ll see you then

04:17 Tim Strifler: Take care, bye.