Welcome to Part Three of our WordPress Web 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 website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is add fresh content on a consistent basis to automatically drive web traffic!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase of the traffic automation process. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we look at the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. We explain why an expertly configured site is different, and how much work needs to be done to ensure that when everything is fully set up and configured, you can automatically start attracting traffic as you begin to add web content on your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as one of their greatest challenges online. Also, the business landscape is becoming so much more competitive and businesses are looking for any advantage available to increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous advantage over the competition. With an expertly configured website, your business has a flying start as soon as your site is launched.
The Configuration Phase Is What Makes All The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s a simple way to understand the difference:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured site gives you a 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 system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with a little story.
Knowing Where To Tap
All is moving along in the gizmo assembly line when all of a sudden, all machines grinds to a complete stop.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the floor manager decides to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert heads straight towards the control box. After staring silently at the schematics for about 3 minutes, the expert then takes out a tiny hammer and makes a very gentle tap near the right-hand corner of the unit.
Immediately, every machine springs to life once more.
The plant 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 rendered for $5,000.
Bordering on outrage, the factory manager picks up the phone and calls the expert. Why were they expected to pay so much for less than five minutes work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving web traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one in the factory floor had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for investing years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to assess and avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a website fully set up and configured so all you 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 time and money would you save if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
Although experts often make complicated situations and problems look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy when you try to work things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring some basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install to add desired functionalities to your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up to achieve desired results
- Which settings you need to configure in order to ensure that things function as envisioned, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This part of the traffic automation system is not so technically challenging, but it’s quite involved and complicated. The reason why 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 involves the integration of many components such as your web hosting server, your site, and various external sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we try to flowchart the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the configuration phase)
Let’s take a brief look at what’s involved.
Your Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for site installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is tweaking settings and options in your web-hosting account specifically for handling web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic you can attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for good and bad traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like implementing server-level spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess and error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites.
External Accounts
The idea behind setting up external sites is that all of your content is published from one central location (your site) and from there, it gets automatically distributed to other components of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After incorporating these external services into your system, content with links pointing back to your site is automatically published on these platforms. Your content and site will then receive exposure online, helping you tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of the sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site to help speed up the 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 settings:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmasters lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of useful information, SEO tools, and reports about their website.
Once your account and site details are set up, you can use this information to integrate and automate web traffic-related 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, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, traffic tracking information can be easily integrated with WordPress via a plugin used with other applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. After setting up your account and entering site details, use this information with traffic-related settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress provides users with a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to build a professional online presence for your business.
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 explain how to integrate this into your automated traffic generation system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site)
You will need your social accounts set up 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 traffic to your site.
Make sure you have set up accounts and profile pages with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as second-tier sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add a feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news 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 many different platforms that can be incorporated into your web traffic system. Please contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
Your WordPress administration area contains a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and often overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have intentionally chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the update services entered into the Update Services section
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section displays only one entry …
(WordPress Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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
This section affects how visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence traffic. For example, choosing 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 decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to view the rest of the content from summaries, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting in this section as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables your site to instantly notify the update services list whenever new posts are 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 Section)
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 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the options for configuring your SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring post permalinks)
To learn more about setting up permalinks in WordPress, refer to this step-by-step tutorial: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs
Configuring WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to increase traffic
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No site is immune from a cyberattack.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to attacks from hackers and bots.
For more details, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help increase traffic by making your site more search engine friendly)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines to find, crawl and index, it also gives you control over how your content is presented in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you post content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can add social features to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins.
Many social sharing plugins allow you to select which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to protect content which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring WordPress Traffic Features In Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, some themes also provide built-in features that let you improve SEO and site linking structure for faster indexing, add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a free theme) have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your website is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure For Improved Traffic
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.
These include the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of business 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 Compliant?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, go here:
Post Categories And Tags
WordPress categories & tags help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.
(Post categories help to improve your site’s search optimization, which improves traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your website’s post tags and post categories during the Website Planning Process.
When configuring your site to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories that have been set up.
A Site Map Of Your Pages and Posts
A visitor site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites find more of your online 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 two different things. Although Google can index your site just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Page – Don’t Lose Traffic!
When visitors type in the wrong URL or click on a link pointing to an incorrect destination on your website, they are presented with an error page (known as a 404 page) …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
A 404 Not Found page can be turned into a useful source of traffic to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your server, there are plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your website has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do is post web content consistently to automatically begin bringing more web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different components and web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some website professionals a long time to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is explained in the next section of our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively and drive traffic automatically with a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven online marketing methods.
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