Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using WordPress.
In Part One 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 web site, all you have to do is add great content on a regular basis to automatically begin bringing more web traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase of the automation process. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will look at the configuration stage of this process. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site so you can bring new visitors automatically as you start to add web content on your website.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With competition becoming increasingly more difficult businesses are looking for any and every advantage they believe will help them improve their performance and results online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge advantage over other competitors. Having an expertly configured WordPress site gives you a flying start and an immediate competitive advantage online.
Configuration Is The Difference
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 one way to explain the key difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only is more labor required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special type of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
Everything was humming along in the gizmo-making assembly line when things suddenly ground to a halt.
As no one could figure out what went wrong, the plant manager decided to call in an expert.
Promptly after arriving, the expert headed out immediately to the main control box. After staring silently at the wiring board for no more than 5 minutes or so, the expert then produced a teensy-weensy hammer from his tool belt and made a single tap near the left side of the control unit.
Immediately, everything began working as before.
The plant manager was delighted as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the manager received a request for payment of $5,000.
The manager picked up the phone and rang the expert, demanding to know why they were charged such a large amount of money for less than five minutes work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrived on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the factory stand to lose when the machines 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 having invested years building up the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to assess and repair a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your blog set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other web properties would be instantly 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 website?)
Although the solution to many problems often seems ridiculously easy once it’s been implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few settings. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed to get certain functionalities on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up and activated to get desired results
- Which settings you need to configure to ensure that everything will function to plan, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This part of the traffic automation system is not technically difficult, but it’s quite involved. It’s not as easy as installing and configuring a plugin, tweaking some settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration stage is a complex process that involves your web hosting server, your website or blog, and a number of external sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified diagram of all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a better look at these steps.
Server Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for installation purposes. What we are talking about, is tweaking settings and options in your webhosting account that affect how you will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your website may attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like integrating spam protection and securing server files, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page error redirections, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these, the next step is to configure various external sites or online services.
External Sites
The idea behind choosing external sites is that all content will be published to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will radiate outwards automatically to other parts of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After incorporating these external platforms into your configuration, content pointing back to your website is automatically posted to these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social networks, even to visitors attracted to the platform itself. Your content and business will benefit from additional exposure online, helping you tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some sites and online services will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress settings to speed up the process 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:
Google Webmasters
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Search Console lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with important data, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account is set up, this information can be used to automate traffic 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 results, SEO, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data are set up, tracking data can be integrated with WordPress via a simple plugin used with other applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account is set up, this information can be used to automate traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers both the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your automated traffic generation system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your various social accounts before you can 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 pages and drive new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts with all the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose the ones that will work well with your system and/or content syndication tools (we will look at some of these tools in greater detail further below and during the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to lots of social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add a feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your account.
There are various solutions that can be incorporated into your own traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
Global WordPress Settings
Your WordPress administration area contains a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and often overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(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 chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services box
By default, this section displays only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(WordPress lets you 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 Settings
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 traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to get the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as your traffic system is concerned, however, the most important setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to notify all the update services you have listed in the Update Services area when a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, make sure this box is left unchecked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion
Although discussion settings 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the ways permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
For a detailed tutorial on setting up permalinks, go here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs
Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that can add just about every type of functionality to your website, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Let’s take a brief look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you simply cannot ignore the importance of web security.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to hackers and botnets.
To learn more, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(WordPress Plugins For SEO – Yoast SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google to find, crawl and index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with WordPress plugins)
There are many free or inexpensive social sharing plugins available for WordPress.
Many social plugins allow you to choose which social 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 social plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads which users can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress Theme Features – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring design and layout elements of your site, many themes also provide built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a free theme) allow you to configure options and settings for improved traffic results)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons to your pages is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure For Increased Traffic Results
Last (but by no means least) in the WordPress traffic blueprint configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for 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 engage in any form of commercial activity online, it’s important that your site is compliant with all regulations.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article about adding legal pages to WordPress here:
Post Tags & Categories
Post categories & tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your website.
(WordPress categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to discuss and set up your site’s post tags and post categories during the Website Planning Stages.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and post categories that have been set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools find more of your online content …
(Site Map – great for 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 contains code that only search engine bots can interpret. Although Google can index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Don’t Forget Your 404 Page
When visitors searching online for your website type in the wrong URL or click on an invalid link, they will normally be greeted with a 404 error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up on your web server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your website expertly configured and fully set up, all you then have to do is publish web content regularly to begin bringing more traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of different elements and external web properties …
(WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some website developers months 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 addressed in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online using a WordPress-driven website and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
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