Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is publish fresh content regularly to automatically generate web traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will discuss the configuration phase of this process. You will understand why an expertly configured WordPress site is different. You will also understand how much work is required to make sure that when all is set up and fully configured, you will bring web traffic automatically simply by adding content on a consistent basis on your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With competition becoming progressively tougher businesses are exploring every opportunity they can to improve their performance and results online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous competitive advantage. With an expertly configured WordPress site, you have a flying start and an immediate advantage online.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here is a simple way to understand the difference:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence plus an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only is more labor required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
Things were humming along in the gizmo plant when everything suddenly ceased working.
No one could figure out what has happened and so the 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 control unit for 5 minutes, the expert then produced a teeny-weeny hammer from his tool box and made a gentle tap near the left-hand corner of the box.
Immediately, every machine in the factory floor returned to normal.
The floor manager was greatly overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager received an invoice for $5,000.
The manager called the expert, demanding to know why he had charged them so much for so little time spent delivering such minimal amount of work and promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrived in the manager’s intray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently 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 in the business was able to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have the right to demand fair compensation for having spent years developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to assess and avert a serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress site set up and configured so all you had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other online properties would be instantly notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
Although the solution to many problems may seem ridiculously simple once it’s been implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than just installing a website and configuring a few basic settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins you need to install to get various functionalities on your site.
- Which third-party accounts you need to set up to achieve specific results
- Which settings you need to configure to make sure things will work as envisioned, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this part of the traffic automation system may not seem so technically difficult, it can be quite involved and time-consuming. This is because it’s not as simple as installing a solution, clicking a button … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many components such as your web server, your site, and a number of external sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart of the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Your Server
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). We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your webhosting account that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic your site will attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for both good and unwanted traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like integrating server-level spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step is to set up and configure various external sites.
External Sites And Services – Configuration
The concept behind choosing external sites is that all content will get published from a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will be automatically distributed to other parts of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you incorporate these external sites into your traffic system, content pointing back to your website will get automatically added to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your website will be given additional exposure to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some sites and services will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress 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:
Google Search Console
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmasters lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with useful data, SEO tools and reports about your website.
After setting up your account, this information can be used with traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrals, etc.
After setting up your account and site details, tracking code can be added to WordPress via a plugin used with other applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account and site details are set up, you can use this information to integrate and automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress offers website owners a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to build a professional business presence online.
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 with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your automated web traffic system in the next installment of this 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 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 and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site.
Set up accounts and profile pages with all the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can You can post your content to lots of social bookmarking sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select those that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(You can post your content to many social bookmarking sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online technology platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your own RebelMouse social feed.
There are many different technologies and third-party applications you can incorporate into your own traffic system. Please contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website Or Blog
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
WordPress Settings
By default, your WordPress dashboard area includes a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains a powerful and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As described in this 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 prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the update services entered into the Update Services box
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section …
(You can 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 in this section can have an influence web traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website to get the rest of the content from summaries, 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 in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Normally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to automatically ping various update services when a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
Discussion Settings
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 sites 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks Screen)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring permalinks)
For a detailed tutorial about setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Plugin Settings
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that can add just about every type of functionality to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Let’s look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help drive more traffic
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, securing your web sites is something you cannot ignore.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to hackers and bots.
Go here for more details:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web content easier for search engines like Google to index …
(WordPress SEO plugins help increase traffic by improving your site’s SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index, it also gives you control over how your content is presented to Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can easily add social sharing features to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Most social sharing plugins let you select which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WordPress Traffic Theme Settings – 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 design and layout aspects of your site, many themes also include options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for faster indexing, easily add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) can be configured for improved traffic results)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing features to your website is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic System – Other Aspects To Consider
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic system configuration process, are the areas that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good 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 (or plan to), it’s important that your website stays compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
We have written a detailed article about how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website or blog here:
Post Tags & Categories
Tags and categories help search engines index your web pages, which improves traffic.
(WordPress categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your web pages.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and post categories should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
When considering ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s categories and tags have been correctly set up to deliver optimal results.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
A site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools discover your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although Google will index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Your WordPress 404 Error Page
When visitors type in the wrong web address or click on links pointing to an incorrect destination on your website, they will typically be greeted with a 404 page …
(A 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 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 plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do then to drive more web traffic is post great content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of different components and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of skills and knowledge required to perform this stage of the traffic automation process can take many web professionals a long time to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section Three
To continue reading this article, click here:
This article is part of an tutorial series aimed at helping small business owners learn how to grow their business and drive traffic organically with a WordPress-powered website and proven web marketing methods.
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