Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive visitors automatically to your site using WordPress.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to start attracting traffic is post fresh content regularly!)
In Part 2, we looked at critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we look at the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. The focus of this section is to help you understand what makes an expertly configured site different from a professionally configured site. You will also understand what type of work needs to be done to ensure that when everything is fully set up and configured, you can automatically get visitors simply by publishing new content on your web site.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by business owners as their greatest challenge online. With business becoming so much more competitive, it’s worth learning about any and every advantage that can help you get better results online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand can be a huge advantage. Having an expertly configured WordPress site gives you a flying start as soon as your website is launched.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here’s a simple way to explain the key difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only are more steps needed to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this here’s a little story.
A Semi-True Story …
Things were moving along in the widget workshop when everything came to a sudden stop.
As no one could figure out what happened, the floor manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert immediately headed to the main control box. After staring silently at the circuit board for 3 minutes, the expert then produced a teensy-weensy hammer and made a gentle tap near the right-hand corner of the control unit.
Immediately, everything returned to normal.
The floor manager was delighted as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager received a request of payment for services for the amount of $5,000.
The factory manager picked up the phone and dialled the expert, demanding to know why they were expected to pay such a ludicrous fee for less than 5 minutes work and 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 number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive web traffic to their sites.
How much money did the factory stand to lose when the machines stopped functioning and no one in the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for spending years developing the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to immediately assess and avert a serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a web 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 online properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your website?)
Although the solution to many challenges can seem ridiculously simple once it’s been implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than just installing a website and configuring a few basic settings. It involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts you need to set up to get certain outcomes
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured to ensure that processes will work the way you have envisioned, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite involved. This is because it’s not as simple as installing a plugin, configuring some options and settings in your dashboard area or clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many parts such as your server, your website, and a number of external sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we create a simplified diagram showing the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Configuring The Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your hosting account for site installation purposes. We’re talking about configuring settings in your web server specifically for handling web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic your website may attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for both 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 redirections, setting up error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these, the next step is to configure a number of external sites or online solutions.
External Sites
The idea behind choosing external sites is that all of your content will be published to one central location (your site) and from there, it will radiate outwards automatically to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you add these external sites to your traffic system, content with links pointing back to your site is automatically posted to search, social and aggregator sites. Your site will be exposed to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some external sites will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress site’s 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 before configuring your WordPress site’s settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Webmasters lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with important data, SEO tools and reports about your website.
Once your account and site data with Google have been set up, use this information with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrers, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account, you can add traffic tracking code to all of your web pages in WordPress using plugins and feed data automatically to other 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 Bing Webmaster Tools account and entering site details, you can use your information to integrate and automate traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to grow a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful 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 these features into your web traffic system in Part Four of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your social media accounts 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 and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have accounts and profiles set up with all the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can You can syndicate your content to lots of social sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we will review some of these tools in more detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(There are many social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online web platforms and content aggregators that can serve as second-tier sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add a feed from your WordPress site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your own RebelMouse social feed.
There are various sites and platforms that can be added to your own web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up third-party site accounts, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Web Site
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
By default, all WordPress installations include a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most powerful and often overlooked traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As described in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the list of update services entered into the Update Services field
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress – just add a list of all the update services you want to notify as soon as you publish a new post to this section and WordPress takes care of the rest …
(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 your content gets seen by readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can have an influence web traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could play a part in someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to read 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 most important setting here 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 your site to ping the update services list whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Screen)
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 posts, 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 enable your site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the ways your site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
We have written a detailed tutorial about using permalinks in WordPress here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings For Traffic Generation
WordPress provides users with plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality to your site, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Let’s take a brief 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 site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No website or blog is guaranteed immunity from being attacked by hackers.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
Go here for more details:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your web pages …
(WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your site’s SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines to find and index, it also lets you configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with members of their social networks can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with free or inexpensive plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins to choose from.
Many social share plugins allow you to choose which social 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 followers), etc. Some plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which users can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress Traffic Generation Theme Features – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, many themes also provide built-in options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes allow you to configure settings and options for better traffic results)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing features to your pages is as easy as clicking a few buttons to configure your options and enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic Automation – Additional Configuration Areas
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic blueprint configuration process, are the things that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic numbers, 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 when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you make money online, it’s important that your site is compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Legally Compliant?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, go here:
Categories & Tags
WordPress categories and tags help to improve your site’s SEO, which improves traffic.
(WordPress categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better organize and index your pages.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s post categories and tags should be set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the categories and tags you have set up.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
A visitor site map that lists all of your site’s posts and pages 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!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. HTML site maps are web pages that link to all other content on your site and provide visitors with a an understandable representation of how your content is structured, while XML sitemaps are mostly code that only search engine bots can read. Although Google will index your site just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Page – A Source Of Lost Traffic Opportunities!
When visitors type in the wrong URL or click on a hyperlink pointing to a destination on your site that no longer exists, they are presented with a 404 page …
(Default WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up in your server, there are several WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your site expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then to automatically attract new traffic is post new content on a regular basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of different elements and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise required to perform this stage of the traffic automation process can take many web professionals a long time to acquire.
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 the WordPress Traffic Blueprint 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 articles aimed at helping website owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively using a WordPress-powered website and proven marketing methods that are easy to implement.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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