Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this series, we provided an overview of 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 site, all you have to do is publish fresh content on a consistent basis to drive more web traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase. We explained 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 existing website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration stage of this process. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to drive new visitors automatically as you begin publishing web content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive worldwide and are exploring any advantage available to improve their results and performance online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous advantage over the competition. With an expertly configured website, you have a significant advantage from the word “go”.
The Configuration Process Is What Makes All The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to understand the difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence with 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 work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this here’s a joke.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
Everything is moving along in the gizmo assembly line when all of a sudden, things grinds to a halt.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the floor manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert immediately heads to the control box. After staring silently at the wiring board for 3 minutes, the expert then takes out a teensy-weensy little hammer from his tool belt and makes a single tap about 2 cm from the left-hand side of the box.
Immediately, the whole machinery starts working once again.
The floor manager is greatly relieved as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the manager receives a request for payment of $5,000.
Bordering on outrage, the manager picks up the phone and dials the expert. Demanding to know why they have been charged so much for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work, he then requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving new visitors to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the factory stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one on the factory floor had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to demand fair compensation for having spent years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to quickly assess and avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a website or blog configured so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other traffic-generating 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 driving traffic to your website?)
Although experts often make complicated things look easy, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than installing a website and configuring a few settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install to add various functionalities to your site.
- Which third-party accounts you need to set up and activate to achieve desired results
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure in order to ensure that processes will run how you have envisioned, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this part of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically challenging, it can be quite complicated. The reason why is because it’s not just about installing and configuring a piece of software, clicking on a button or two, or tweaking some settings in your dashboard area … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration phase is a complex process that involves your web server, your website or blog, and a number of external sites …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine what’s involved.
Web Server Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for website installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your web hosting account specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic your website can attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both good and unwanted traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like configuring server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
Once your server settings have been checked and configured (if required), the next step is to configure various external sites and/or online services.
Configuring External Services
The idea behind adding external sites is that all of your content is published to one central location (your site) and from there, it syndicates automatically to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external platforms have been added to your network, content linking back to your site will get automatically syndicated to search, social and aggregator accounts. Your site will be given exposure to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some third-party sites will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress settings to 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 Search Console)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with important information, SEO tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account with Google Webmaster Tools, use your information to automate web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress 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, search engine and organic referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data have been set up, you can add traffic tracking code to WordPress using a simple plugin and feed data automatically to many other applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account with Bing, the information can be used to automate traffic-related settings 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 a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to grow a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your automated traffic system in Part Four of this series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need to have already set up your social media accounts in order to configure these as part of 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 get new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have accounts and pages set up with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are lots of social 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 with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(There are lots of social sites you can syndicate your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online platforms and content aggregators that can serve as second-tier 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 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 visitors can follow your RebelMouse website.
There are various sites and platforms that can be incorporated into your own traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore this area further and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global WordPress Settings
By default, your WordPress dashboard area includes a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains a powerful and often overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As described below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically configured your settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services field
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section lists only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress – just add a list of update services to this section …
(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
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 influence web traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your site 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 main setting here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Typically, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to instantly ping the list of update services when new posts get 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 unticked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings)
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
Permalinks enable your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
If you need help setting up permalinks, go here: Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs
Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your website, 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 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 securing your sites.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to bots and hackers.
Go here for more info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages easy for search engines to find and index …
(SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help increase traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines to index, it also gives you control over how your content is presented to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with members of their social networks can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using WordPress plugins)
You can easily add social sharing features to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Most social share plugins let you specify which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads 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 improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, many themes also give you built-in features that let you improve SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a free theme) have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your site is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features)
Other Configuration Features For WordPress Sites
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 Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for both good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you do any type of business online, you need to ensure that your website is compliant with government regulations.
(Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
For a detailed article about the importance of having a legally compliant website, go here:
Post Tags & Categories
WordPress post tags & post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s SEO.
(WordPress post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and categories should be discussed and set up during the Website Planning Stage.
When considering ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s tags and categories have been correctly set up to deliver optimal results.
Add A Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools discover more of your web content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. HTML site maps are web pages that provide users with a an understandable representation of how your content is structured, whereas XML sitemaps are mostly code that only search bots can interpret. Although Google can index your site just using 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.
404 Error Page – Another Source Of Web Traffic!
When online visitors enter the wrong URL or click on a link pointing to an incorrect destination on your website, they will normally be greeted with a 404 error page …
(A WordPress 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web 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 error 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 admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your website has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then is publish content on a regular basis to generate web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of various components and external web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The skills and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take many website developers a long time to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is covered in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read more, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively and drive traffic organically with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven marketing strategies that are easy to implement.
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