Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a site into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is post new content on a regular basis to start generating traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this article, we look at the configuration stage of this process. We will show you why an expertly configured site is different. You will also discover what type of work is required to ensure that when all is fully set up and configured, you can get new traffic automatically simply by consistently adding content on your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Also, the business landscape is becoming so much more competitive worldwide and businesses are exploring any and every advantage they believe will help them increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous advantage. With an expertly configured website, your business has a flying start as soon as your website is launched.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
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 developer but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to explain the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special kind of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing story.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
Things are running smoothly in the gizmo manufacturing plant when everything grinds to a sudden halt.
As no one can figure out what’s wrong, the floor manager decides to call in an expert.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrives and, without saying a word, heads out immediately to the control box. After staring silently at the circuit board for 5 minutes or so, the expert then takes out a teensy-weensy little hammer and makes a gentle tap near the left-hand side of the box.
Immediately, everything in the workshop returns once again to normal.
The floor manager is greatly relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the manager receives a request of payment for services totalling $5,000.
With great anger, the factory manager picks up the phone and calls the expert. Demanding to know why they have been charged such a large amount of money for so little time spent delivering 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 in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is driving web traffic to their sites.
How much money did the widget plant stand to lose when the machines stopped working and no one on the factory floor had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to ask to be compensated fairly for having invested years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and repair a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your WordPress website fully configured so all you have to do is publish new content and search engines, social media and dozens of other traffic-generating online properties would be instantly 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 the solution to many challenges often seems ridiculously easy once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is 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 plugins you need to install for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up and activate to get desired results
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure to ensure that everything works to plan, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite involved and complicated. This is because it’s not just about installing a solution, clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration stage is a complex process that involves your server, your website, and various external sites and services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If the activities involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram showing the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine what’s involved in more detail.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for website installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is tweaking settings and options in your web server that affect how your website will handle 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 can attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include things like implementing spam protection and securing server files, to configuring your domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After your server settings have been fine-tuned and configured (if required), the next step is to set up and configure various third-party sites.
Configuring External Sites
The idea behind setting up external sites is that all content will be published from a central location (your site) and from there, it will syndicate automatically to other parts of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you add these external services to your setup, content linking back to your site will be automatically posted to search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and website will be given exposure to a new audience and new sources of traffic.
Some external 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 before configuring your WordPress site:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Webmasters lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of essential data, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your account, you can use your information to integrate and automate web traffic settings 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 performance, SEO, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
After setting up your Once you have set up your Google Analytics account, you can add tracking information to WordPress via a simple Google Analytics plugin and send data automatically to various other online applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account with Bing Webmaster Tools, this information can be used with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to build a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your web traffic system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your social accounts in order to 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 have pages set up with all the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick the ones that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools (we will look at some of these tools in more detail in the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to many social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging technology platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free levels, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add a feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
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 social feed.
There are various technologies and third-party applications you can incorporate into your own web traffic system. Please contact us if you would like to explore this area further and discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global WordPress Settings
The WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most powerful and often overlooked traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As described below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have purposely configured your site settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services box
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section includes only one entry …
(WordPress Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list containing all of the update services you want notified to this section and WordPress takes care of the rest …
(You can 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 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, choosing to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to get the rest of the content from a partial feed, 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 ticked or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to instantly notify the update services list whenever new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, leave this box unchecked …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion
Although the settings in this section 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 Screen)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow your site to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the ways permalink URLs can be configured …
(Configuring permalinks)
If you need help setting up WordPress permalinks, refer to this step-by-step tutorial: Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs
Configuring Settings – WP Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that can add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your site, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Let’s look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with the effects of 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, web security is something you cannot ignore.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
More information:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress Plugin)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google to find 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 Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with members of their social networks can help boost traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with WordPress plugins)
You can easily add social sharing features to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social plugins allow you to choose which social sites visitors can share your content 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 set up protected content sections on your site which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings For Traffic Generation
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, in addition to 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 navigation structure for better indexing, easily add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing features to your website is as easy as clicking a few buttons and enabling the feature …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic System Configuration – Additional Areas To Consider
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic system configuration process, are the elements 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 a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for both good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you are making money online, you need to make sure that your site is found to comply with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business online.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article about why it’s important to have a legally compliant website here:
Tags And Categories
WordPress post categories and tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your website.
(Categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better organize and index your web pages.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to discuss and set up your website’s post tags and categories during the Website Planning Phases.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories you have set up.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications find more of your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although Google can 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 Not Found – A Source Of Lost Traffic Opportunities!
When visitors enter the wrong web address or click on an invalid link, they will normally be greeted with a 404 error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
A 404 Not Found error page can redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your server, there are several WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your website or blog fully set up and expertly configured, all you then need to do is add web content regularly to automatically start generating new web traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of various elements and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The skills and expertise required to perform this process can take some web professionals a long time to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is addressed in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This article is part of an article series aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively and drive traffic sustainably with a WordPress-driven website and proven marketing methods that are easy to implement.
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