Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is add great content regularly to attract web traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will look at the configuration phase of the traffic automation process. We will show you how to configure a WordPress site so you can automatically start to get new visitors when you begin to publish content on your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Configuration
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With business getting ever more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth exploring any advantage that can help you increase your own competitiveness online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous advantage over the competition. For businesses, having an expertly configured website means having an immediate advantage from the word “go”.
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 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 differences:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only is extra labor required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special kind of expertise.
To illustrate this point here’s an amusing story.
A Semi-True Story …
Things are humming along in the gizmo assembly workshop when everything comes to a sudden stop.
No one can figure out what is wrong and so the floor manager decides to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert heads directly towards the main control box. After staring silently at the electronic components for no more than 3 minutes or so, the expert then produces a teensy-weensy hammer from his shirt pocket and makes a very gentle tap near the top-left corner of the box.
Immediately, everything comes back to life.
The floor manager is greatly overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a request of payment for services for the sum of $5,000.
Bewildered and bordering on a sense of outrage, the factory manager calls the expert. Why were they expected to pay such a ridiculously high fee for so little time delivering such 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 it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive visitors to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the plant stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to be compensated fairly for investing years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly assess and fix a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WP site set up so all you had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social media and dozens of other web properties would be immediately 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 website?)
Although the solution to many challenges often seems ridiculously easy once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring some basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install to get various functionalities on your site.
- Which services need to be set up to get specific outcomes
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure in order to ensure that processes will work as envisioned, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this part of the traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite involved and complicated. This is because it’s not just about installing one or two plugins, clicking on a button or two, or configuring some settings in your dashboard area … it’s all this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a complex process that involves your web hosting server, your WP site, and a number of third-party sites and online services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart of all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these areas in more detail.
Your Server
We’re not talking here 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-hosting account specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, 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 site can attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like implementing server-level spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, setting up 404 error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page error redirections, etc?)
After your web server settings have been checked and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites or online services.
Configuring External Web Properties
The basic idea of choosing external sites is that all of your content will be posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will be distributed automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you add these external services to your configuration, content pointing back to your site is automatically syndicated to these platforms. Your content and website will be exposed to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some external sites will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site 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 before configuring your WordPress site:
Google Search Console
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Webmasters lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with a range of useful information, SEO tools and reports about your website.
Once your Google Search Console account and site details are set up, your account information can be used to automate traffic settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrals, etc.
After setting up your up your account and entered your site details, you can add your account code to WordPress using a simple Google Analytics plugin and send data instantly to various 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 Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account and entering site details, you can use this information to integrate and automate traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers website owners a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your automated web traffic generation system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media accounts and get new traffic 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 sites and attract new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have set up accounts and profiles with all of the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick the ones that will work with your system and/or content syndication tools (we will cover some of these tools in greater detail further below and during the Automation phase).
(There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of emerging web platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary-level sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free levels, 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 – Distribute social content to social networks)
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 RebelMouse social feed.
There are various platforms you can incorporate into your own traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
Configuring WordPress
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
WordPress Settings
Your WordPress administration area contains a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains a powerful and often overlooked traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As stated below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services text box
By default, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(WordPress lets you 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 your content gets seen by readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content shows up 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 view the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as traffic is concerned, however, the main setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to automatically notify all the update services you have listed whenever new posts get 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)
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 content, 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the ways site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
If you need help setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
WP Plugin Settings
WordPress provides users with plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Let’s look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that improve traffic generation
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No website is guaranteed immunity from a cyber attack.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to botnets and hackers.
More information:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your website more search engine friendly …
(SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help increase traffic by making your site more search engine friendly)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using WordPress plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins available for WordPress.
Many social sharing plugins let you specify 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 followers), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads which visitors can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WordPress Traffic Generation Theme Features – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, some themes also provide built-in options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes can be configured for better traffic results)
With many themes, adding social sharing features to your content is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic Automation – Other Important 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:
Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site 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 start finding and visiting your website.
If you do business online (or plan to), it’s important that your site is found to comply with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate online business practices.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?)
We have created a detailed article on how to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress site here:
Post Tags & Categories
Categories and tags help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which helps to increase traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your pages.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s categories and tags should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
When looking at ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post categories and tags that have been set up.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
A site map that displays all of your pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications find your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. Although search engines like Google can index your site just using an XML sitemap (which plugins 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 Error Page – Don’t Forget To Configure It!
When online users type in the wrong web address into their browser or click on links pointing to destinations on your site that no longer exist, they will normally be greeted with an error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Error Page)
A 404 page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your web server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your site expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then to drive more traffic is publish content consistently.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of different elements and web properties …
(WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration process typically takes some website developers months to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is addressed in the next section of our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive tutorial series aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online using a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven marketing strategies that are easy to implement.
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