Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic generating machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is post web content on a consistent basis to automatically begin attracting more web traffic!)
In Part 2, we looked at critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In this section, we look at the configuration stage of the traffic automation process. We explain why an expertly configured WordPress site is different, and just what kind of work is required to ensure that when all is set up and configured, you can begin attracting new traffic automatically simply by regularly posting content on your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With competition becoming increasingly more difficult businesses are researching every advantage they can that can help you get better results online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can be a huge competitive advantage. For business owners, having an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start from the moment their website is launched.
The Difference Is In The Configuration Process
There is a significant 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 is a simple way to describe the key difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does a whole lot more labor go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special type of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing anecdote.
A Semi-True Story …
Things are moving along in the widget assembly line when the machinery suddenly stops.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the plant manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
The expert arrives shortly afterwards and, without uttering a word, walks immediately towards the main control box. After staring at the wires and circuitry for no more than 3 minutes, the expert then produces a tiny little hammer from his utility belt and makes a very gentle tap about one inch from the right corner of the box.
Immediately, everything returns to normal.
The manager is greatly overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a request for payment of $5,000.
Unable to contain his anger and bewilderment, the manager dials the expert. Why were they expected to pay so much for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrives in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving visitors to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when the machines ground to a halt and no one in the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have the right to ask to be compensated fairly for spending years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to assess and avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WP web site fully set up and configured so all you have to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other web properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
While experts often make complex things look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than installing a website and configuring some basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which 3rd-party services need to be set up to achieve certain results
- Which settings need to be configured in order to make sure processes will run to plan, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this part of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically difficult, it can be quite complicated. It’s not as easy as installing and configuring a plugin, clicking a button … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a process that involves your web hosting server, your WordPress site, and various third-party sites …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing all the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Web Server Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for website installation purposes. What we are talking about, is tweaking settings in your server that affect how you will handle all web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your web-hosting account settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your business can attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for both good and unwelcome traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess and error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
After your web server settings have been fine-tuned and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites and/or online services.
External Sites
The concept behind adding external sites is that all content should be posted to one central location (your site) and from there, radiate outwards to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external sites have been added to your traffic system, content pointing back to your site will get automatically posted to search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and website benefits from added exposure online, helping your business tap into a new audience and traffic source.
Some of these external sites and online solutions will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress site to help save time and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, here are just some of the accounts you will need to have set up before configuring your settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Webmasters lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with essential information, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your Google Webmaster Tools account and entering site details, this information can be used to integrate and automate web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
After setting up your account and site data, you can add your account code to all of your web pages in WordPress via a plugin and feed data instantly to other useful applications and web properties.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account, use this information to automate web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers users a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to grow a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, 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 generation system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media accounts and attract new traffic to your site)
You will need to have already set up your social media and social bookmarking accounts before you can integrate these with your traffic generation system.
Once you have set up and configured everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site.
You should set up accounts with all the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can set up. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose those that will work with your system and/or content syndication tools (we will review some of these tools in more detail in the Automation phase).
(There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging web platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add an RSS feed from your WordPress blog …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute your content to social networks)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your account.
There are various platforms you can add to your own web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore this area further and discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up external service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
Configuring WordPress Settings
By default, your WordPress administration area includes a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and often overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – 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 purposely configured your settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services field
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is listed …
(Writing Settings – WordPress Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section …
(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 Settings
This section affects how visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can have an influence traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your site to get the rest of the content from summaries, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as traffic is concerned, however, the most important setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to instantly notify all the update services you have listed 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 this section is mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to sites 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 Section)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow your site to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
We have written a detailed tutorial on using WordPress permalinks here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring Settings – Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that can add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help your site generate more traffic
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you cannot ignore the importance of securing your sites.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
For more details, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web pages more search engine friendly …
(WP Plugin – Yoast SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s search engine optimization. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to find and index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed to Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content with their social networks can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can add social features to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can add social features to your site easily using WordPress plugins.
Many social share plugins let you specify which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress – Traffic Features In Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, some themes also provide built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing features to your pages is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure For Improved Traffic Results
Last but not least in the web traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you do any type of business online, it’s important that your site is compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate online business practices.
(Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help understanding why it’s important to have a legally compliant website, refer to this article:
Post Tags And Post Categories
Post categories and tags help to improve your site’s SEO, which helps you get more traffic.
(Post categories help search engines better classify and index your pages, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s post categories and tags earlier on, during the Website Planning Phases.
When configuring your web site to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and post categories you have set up.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A site map that displays all of your pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications find more of your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
Note: 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, while an XML sitemap is code that only search bots can interpret. Although Google can index your pages just using 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.
Don’t Forget Your 404 Page Not Found
When online users enter the wrong URL or click on a link pointing to a destination on your site that no longer exists, they are presented with an error – page not found message …
(A WordPress 404 Error Page)
A 404 Not Found error page can be configured to funnel traffic to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your server, there are plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your website has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then is publish web content on a consistent basis to start generating more traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of various components and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The skills and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take some website professionals months to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is addressed in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Part 3
To continue reading, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of an article series designed to help small business owners learn how to grow their business and drive traffic automatically using a WordPress-driven website and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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