Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into 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 generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is add web content regularly to start attracting traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration phase of the WordPress traffic automation system. We will explain why an expertly configured WordPress site is different, and what kind of work is required to ensure that when everything is set up and fully configured, traffic will automatically start flowing just by consistently publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With competition making business survival progressively tougher businesses are researching every opportunity they can to get better results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous competitive advantage. With an expertly configured website, you have a flying start and an immediate competitive advantage online.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s a simple way to understand the main difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only is extra labor required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expertise.
Allow me to illustrate this with a joke.
Knowing Where To Tap
Things were going fine in the gizmo-making factory when everything suddenly came to a halt.
As no one could figure out what happened, the manager decided to call in an expert.
The expert arrived within the hour and immediately headed to the main control box. After staring silently at the box for less than 5 minutes, the expert then produced a teensy-weensy hammer from his tool belt and made a gentle tap about 2 cm from the left edge of the unit.
Immediately, the machines returned to normal.
The manager was greatly relieved as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the manager received a bill for $5,000.
The manager called the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged so much for less than 5 minutes work and promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice arrived in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive traffic to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one on the business had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to demand fair compensation for having invested years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to avert a very serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your web site set up so all you had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other 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 attracting new visitors to your website?)
Although the solution to many challenges can seem ridiculously simple in hindsight, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few internal settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which third-party accounts need to be set up to achieve specific outcomes
- Which options need to be configured to make sure everything will function to plan, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not technically difficult, but it’s quite involved and complicated. It’s not as easy as installing and configuring a solution, configuring some settings in your dashboard area … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration phase is a process that involves your web server, your website, and a number of third-party sites or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we were to create a simplified diagram showing the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these areas in more detail.
Your Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for website installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is configuring settings in your web server specifically for handling web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your hosting account settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your site will attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for good and unwanted traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like configuring server-level spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these, the next step is to configure a number of external sites and/or online solutions.
External Web Properties And Services – Configuration
The basic concept of choosing external sites is that all of your content is published from one central location (your site) and from there, it then gets automatically distributed to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you add these external services to your configuration, content linking back to your website gets automatically published on these platforms, indexed by search engines and distributed to social networks, even to visitors attracted to the platform itself. Your business will benefit from exposure online, helping you tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of the third-party sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site to speed up the configuration process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, here are just some of the accounts you will need to have set up:
Google Search Console
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of important information, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your account, use this information with web traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site details have been set up, traffic tracking code can be added to all pages in WordPress via a plugin and and sent to many other useful 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. Once your account and site data with Bing Webmaster Tools have been set up, use the details to automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress provides users with the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to build a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, 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 this into your traffic system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site)
You will need your social accounts set up before you can 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 social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site.
Set up accounts and profiles with all of the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick the ones that will work with your system and/or content syndication tools (we cover some of these tools in more detail during the Automation phase).
(There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online web platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different user types.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress blog feed …
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 social feed.
There are various technologies and third-party applications you can incorporate into your own traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with third-party services, it’s time to configure WordPress.
Configuring WordPress For Traffic
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
Your WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Screen)
As described in 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 prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services text box
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section displays only one entry …
(Update Services)
WordPress lets you 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 and WordPress takes care of the rest …
(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 on this page can influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your site to view 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 main setting here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to notify various update services when a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings)
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 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the ways your post permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
If you need help setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: Changing WordPress Permalinks
WordPress – Traffic Generation Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Let’s look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can improve traffic generation
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 matter what kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, securing your websites is something you simply cannot ignore.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to hackers and botnets.
To learn more, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(WordPress Plugin – Yoast SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines to find, crawl and index, it allows you to specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you post content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website using WordPress plugins.
Many social sharing plugins let you specify which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which users can unlock by liking your page.
WP Theme Settings
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 layout and design of your website, some themes also give you options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) allow you to configure options and settings for better traffic results)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your website is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic system configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic, 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 start finding and visiting your website.
If you do business online (or plan to), you need to make sure that your website stays compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, see this article:
WordPress Tags & Post Categories
Post tags & categories help search engines index your pages, which helps to increase traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search engine optimization.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s post tags and post categories earlier on, during the Website Planning Process.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and post categories have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits and results.
A Site Map Of Your Pages and Posts
A site map that displays all of your site’s pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites discover your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – An Additional Source Of Web Traffic!
When online visitors enter the wrong web address or click on a link pointing to a page on your website that no longer exists, they will normally be presented with a 404 error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
A 404 Error Page can be configured to funnel traffic to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error page can be set up in your web server, there are plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your website or blog expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then to bring web traffic is add new content on a regular basis.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many website professionals months to acquire.
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 series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read more, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive article series designed to help business owners learn how to grow their business using a WordPress-powered website and proven online marketing strategies.
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