Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic generating machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is post web content consistently to automatically start generating web traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will discuss the configuration phase of the traffic system. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that visitors will automatically start flowing as you begin to publish fresh content to your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Also, the business landscape is becoming so much more competitive and businesses are exploring every advantage available to get better results online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous advantage over the competition. Having an expertly configured WordPress site gives you a flying start from the moment your site is launched.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
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 one way to explain the differences:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only are more steps 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.
Knowing Where To Tap
Things are going well in the gizmo assembly line when all of a sudden, everything stops.
No one can figure out what is wrong and so the manager decides to call in an expert.
Promptly after arriving, the expert walks directly to the main control box. After staring at the board for no more than 3 minutes or so, the expert then takes out a little hammer and makes a very gentle tap about 1 inch from the right edge of the box.
Immediately, everything starts working as before.
The manager is overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the manager receives a request for payment of services rendered for the sum of $5,000.
Feeling angry, the factory manager dials the expert. Demanding to know why they have been charged such a large amount of money for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrives on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive web traffic consistently to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when the equipment stopped working and no one on the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to ask to be compensated fairly for spending years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly fix a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your WP site configured so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social networking sites and dozens of other traffic-generating online properties would be immediately 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 site?)
While experts often make difficult solutions look simple, 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 involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts need to be set up and activated to get desired results
- Which settings you need to configure to make sure things work as expected, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically challenging, it can be quite complicated. It’s not as simple as installing a plugin, clicking a button … it’s all this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a process that involves 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 simple flowchart of the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram showing all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these areas.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your hosting account for site installation purposes. What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings in your web server that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic your business may attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like implementing spam protection and securing server files, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirections, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and/or online services.
External Services
The basic concept of setting up external sites is that all content gets posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it gets automatically distributed to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external services have been added to your network, content pointing back to your website will get automatically fed to these platforms, indexed by search engines and distributed to social networks, even to visitors attracted to the platform itself. Your content and website will be exposed to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some third-party sites and solutions will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site’s 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 Search Console)
Google Search Console lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of important data, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your account and site details with Google Webmaster Tools have been set up, use the account information with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site details have been set up, you can add traffic tracking information to WordPress via a plugin and feed data instantly to other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account and entering site data with Bing, this information can be used with web traffic-related settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress provides users with the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, 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 generation system in Part Four of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social media accounts set up 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 sites and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site.
You should have accounts and profile pages with all of the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools (we will review some of these tools in more detail during the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to many social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your website.
There are various sites and platforms that can be added to your own traffic blueprint. Please 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 web server and set up third-party 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 make sure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
Global Settings – WordPress
Your WordPress admin area contains a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Screen)
As described below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically configured your settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of update services entered into the Update Services section
By default, this section contains only one entry …
(Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of all the update services you want to notify as soon as you publish a new post 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 web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could play a part in someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to read the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to automatically ping various update services when a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Section)
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 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings enable your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring permalinks)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about setting up permalinks, go here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs
Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add almost every kind of functionality to your site, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help drive more traffic
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your website 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 cannot afford to ignore the importance of securing your sites.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to botnets and hackers.
To learn more, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web content easier for search engines like Google to index …
(WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index, it also lets you specify how to present your content to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if your site provides content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using WordPress plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins available for WordPress.
Many social sharing plugins let you select which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to protect content which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Theme Settings
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 the layout and design of your site, many themes also include built-in options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a free theme) come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing features to your content is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons and enabling the feature …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Other Areas To Configure For Increased Traffic Results
Last but not least in the web traffic system configuration process, are the elements that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and unwelcome traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you are making money online (or are planning to), it’s important that your site is compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Site Compliant?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, go here:
Post Categories & Tags
Categories & post tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your pages.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your web pages.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your website’s post categories and tags earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the tags and categories that have been set up.
HTML Site Map
A site map that lists all of your posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites find your web content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – Don’t Forget To Configure It!
When visitors type in the wrong web address into their web browser or click on an invalid hyperlink, they are greeted with an error page …
(A 404 Not Found page)
A 404 Not Found error page can redirect confused visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up on your web server, there are several plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your website has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you then have to do to start generating more traffic is publish fresh content on a regular basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of various components and web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise required to perform the configuration stage of the traffic automation process can take many web professionals a long time to learn.
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 WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read more, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online and drive traffic sustainably with a WordPress website or blog and proven marketing methods that are easy and quick to implement.
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