Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new visitors automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to begin attracting more traffic is publish new content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we will look at the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured in order to ensure that web traffic will automatically start flowing when you start to add web content on your website.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With competition making business survival progressively tougher businesses are exploring any and every advantage available to increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous advantage over other competitors. An expertly configured WordPress site gives you an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
The Difference Is In The Configuration Stage
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to describe the main difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only is extra work required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
Knowing Where To Tap
All is going fine in the widget factory when everything suddenly ceases working.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the floor manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Soon afterward, the expert arrives and, without saying a word, immediately walks towards the control box. After staring silently at the wires and circuitry for no more than 3 minutes, the expert then produces a tiny hammer from his utility belt and makes a very gentle tap near the right-hand side of the control unit.
Immediately, every machine inside the assembly line springs to life once again.
The manager is overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a request for payment of $5,000.
Bordering on outrage, the manager calls the expert. Demanding to know why they were charged such a large amount of money for less than 5 minutes work, he then requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives and is placed in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic consistently to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when production stopped working and no one in the factory floor had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to get paid fairly for having spent years developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to quickly fix a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WP site set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other web properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your website?)
While the solution to many challenges is often ridiculously simple once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than simply installing a website and configuring some of the site settings for a client. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins you need to install to add various functionalities to your site.
- Which services need to be set up to get desired outcomes
- Which settings need to be configured in order to ensure that things function as expected, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite involved. The reason why is because it’s not just about installing a solution, clicking on a button or two, or tweaking some settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of different components including your server, your web site, and various external sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If we create a simple flowchart showing all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these areas in more detail.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for site installation purposes. What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings and options in your web server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your web hosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic you may attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like integrating server-level spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page error redirections, etc?)
After your server settings have been fine-tuned and configured, the next step is to configure various external sites and services.
3rd-Party Accounts Integration
The idea behind adding external sites is that all content is posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it gets automatically distributed to other parts of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you add these external platforms to your configuration, content linking back to your website gets automatically published on these platforms, indexed by search engines and distributed to social networks, even to users of the platform itself. Your content and website will be given exposure to a new audience and new sources of traffic.
Some sites and services will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress settings to help speed up the configuration process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmasters)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of important data, SEO tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account with Google, use the details with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s results, SEO, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account and site data, you can add tracking code to WordPress via a simple plugin and send data instantly to various other applications and web properties.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account and entering site data with Bing Webmaster Tools, your details can be used to automate web traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers website owners the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to build a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your traffic generation system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your social media accounts before you can integrate these with 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 social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site.
You should set up accounts and profile pages with all the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work with your system and/or content syndication tools.
(There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging technology platforms and content aggregators that can act as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free plans, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
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 own RebelMouse social feed.
There are many different sites and platforms you can incorporate into your traffic system. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up third-party service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
Configuring Your WordPress Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring WordPress Settings
The WordPress admin area contains a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As stated in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have intentionally configured your settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the list of services entered into the Update Services section
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section contains only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(Notify dozens of update services automatically!)
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 visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence web traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website to view the rest of the content from a partial feed, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as traffic is concerned, however, the main setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Typically, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables your site to automatically notify your update services list whenever new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Global 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
Here are some of the options for configuring your post permalinks …
(Configuring permalinks)
We have created a detailed tutorial on using permalinks in WordPress here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks
WordPress – Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that can add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your site, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No website or blog is completely safe from being attacked by hackers.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to hackers and botnets.
More info:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your site more search engine friendly …
(WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive traffic by making your website more search engine friendly)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to find and index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you post content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social features to your site using WordPress plugins)
There are loads of free or inexpensive social sharing plugins available for WordPress.
Many social sharing plugins let you specify which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings For Traffic Generation
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, some themes also include options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) include built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your site is as easy as clicking a few buttons to configure your settings and enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Additional Configuration Features For WordPress Traffic
Last (but by no means least) in the WordPress traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle good and unwanted traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you do business online (or plan to), it’s important that your website complies with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done.
(Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, go here:
Tags & Post Categories
Categories and post tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your pages.
(Post categories help search engines index your website, which improves traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your website’s tags and categories during the Website Planning Stages.
When looking at ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s tags and categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal benefits and results.
Add A Site Map
A site map that displays all of your posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites discover more of your website content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – Don’t Forget To Configure This Too!
When visitors enter the wrong web address or click on a dead hyperlink, they are presented with an error page (known as a 404 page) …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect web 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 from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your website has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do is publish fresh content on a regular basis to bring web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and external web properties …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many web professionals a long time to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is explained in the next article in our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section Three
To continue reading, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help website owners learn how to grow their business online and drive traffic organically using a WordPress website and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
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