Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new visitors automatically to your website using WordPress.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is post great content on a consistent basis to begin bringing new web traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In this section, we will discuss the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. We will show you how to configure a WordPress site so you can bring visitors automatically whenever you post web content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business getting increasingly more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth looking into any advantage available to get better results online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous advantage over other competitors. With an expertly configured website, your business has an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to understand the main difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does a whole lot more labor go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special type of expertise.
Let me illustrate this with a story.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
Everything was moving along in the gizmo-making assembly line when all of a sudden, all equipment stopped.
No one could figure out what happened and so the floor manager decided to call in an expert.
Promptly after arriving, the expert headed out directly to the control box. After staring silently at the wiring diagrams for no more than 5 minutes or so, the expert then produced a teensy-weensy hammer and made a single tap about 1 cm from the right side of the box.
Immediately, everything inside the plant began working again.
The plant manager was overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the factory manager received a request of payment for services totalling $5,000.
The manager picked up the phone and rang the expert, demanding to know why he had charged them such a ludicrous fee for less than five minutes work and then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice arrived and was placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new visitors to their sites.
How much money did the factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one in the business had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to demand fair compensation for years spent building up the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to assess and avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your web site fully set up so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social sites and dozens of other traffic-generating online properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
Although many experts often make complex situations and problems look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to figure things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring settings for a client. It also involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed to get specific functionalities on your site.
- Which third-party services you need to set up and activate to achieve desired outcomes
- Which settings you need to configure in order to make sure processes will run as planned, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite complicated. This is because it’s not as easy as installing and configuring one or two plugins, clicking a button … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration stage is a process that involves your web hosting server, your site, and various external sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If the activities involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified diagram showing the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these areas in more detail.
Server Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your hosting account for installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings and options in your web-hosting account that affect how your site will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic you will attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like server-level spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess and error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirections, etc?)
After your server settings have been checked and configured (if required), the next step is to configure a number of external sites and services.
Third-Party Sites Configuration
The purpose of adding external sites is that all content is posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it radiates outwards automatically to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external sites have been added to your setup, content with links pointing back to your website will get automatically fed to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and site will then receive exposure online, helping your business tap into a whole new audience and traffic source.
Some sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your settings to help save time and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with a range of useful data, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your account, this information can be used to automate web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s traffic performance, SEO, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account has been set up, traffic tracking information can be added to all of your web pages in WordPress using a plugin used with other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. After setting up your account, you can use this information with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers website owners a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you are planning to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your traffic system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and bring new traffic to your site)
You will need your social media and social bookmarking accounts set up in order to configure these as part of your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and get new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have pages set up with all the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select those that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we will review some of these tools in more detail further below and during the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to loads of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free levels, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your account.
There are various solutions that can be added to your web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring WordPress Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and often overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Section)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally configured your settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services box
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section displays only one entry …
(WordPress Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress – just add a list of update services to this section …
(You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading
This section affects how your content gets seen by visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to view the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting in this section as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to instantly ping various update services whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unchecked …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings)
Discussion Settings
Although the settings in this section are mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs linked to from your articles, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings enable your site to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks Section)
Here are some of the options for configuring your permalink URLs …
(Configuring post permalinks)
If you need help setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs
Configuring Settings – WordPress Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality to your site, including traffic generation.
Let’s look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to improve traffic generation
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No website or blog is immune from being hacked.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to hackers and bots.
To learn more, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help increase traffic by improving your website’s SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content with their own networks can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
There are many social sharing plugins to choose from.
Many social share plugins let you select which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your pages which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
Configuring WordPress Traffic Features In Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, many themes also include options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes like Graphene (a free theme) allow you to configure options and settings for better traffic results)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing features to your content is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons and enabling the function …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic Configuration – Other Areas To Consider
Last (but by no means least) in the traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business as more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you do business online (or are planning to), it’s important that your site remains compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, go here:
Post Tags And Post Categories
Post tags & categories help to improve your site’s SEO, which helps to increase traffic.
(Categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better classify and index your website.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s post tags and categories during the Website Planning Process.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories you have set up.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A site map that displays all of your site’s pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications discover more of your online content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, whereas an XML sitemap is mostly just a bunch of code that only search engines can read. Although search engines like Google can index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – Don’t Forget This!
When visitors searching for your website enter the wrong web address into their browser or click on links pointing to pages on your site that no longer exist, they are greeted with a 404 error page …
(A 404 Not Found error page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up on your web server, there are plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your website has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then to automatically attract new traffic is publish fresh content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of various elements and web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration process typically takes some web professionals a long time to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is covered in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively and drive traffic sustainably with a WordPress website or blog and proven online marketing methods.
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