Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically start attracting web traffic is post new content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we focused on 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 existing website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this section of the series, we look at the configuration phase of the WordPress traffic automation system. You will learn how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that traffic will automatically start flowing simply by publishing content regularly to your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as their greatest challenge online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive and are exploring any advantage available to increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous advantage. Having an expertly configured website gives you an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to describe the main difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only is additional work required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
Let me illustrate this point with a story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All was running smoothly in the gizmo assembly line when things came to a sudden stop.
As no one could figure out what happened, the floor manager decided to call in an expert.
The expert arrived shortly after being summoned and immediately went to the control box. After staring silently at the board for less than 3 minutes, the expert then took out a tiny hammer from his tool belt and made a gentle tap about 1 cm from the left side of the box.
Immediately, everything began working once again.
The manager was overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the manager received a bill for $5,000.
The factory manager dialed the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged such a ridiculously high fee for less than five minutes work and then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrived and was placed 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 consistently to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when the machines stopped functioning and no one on the business was able to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to ask to be compensated fairly for spending years developing the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to immediately assess and avert a very serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a website or blog set up and configured so all you have to do is publish content to it and search engines, social sites like Facebook and LinkedIn and dozens of other traffic-generating online properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
While many experts often make complex solutions look easy, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring some basic settings. It involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which plugins you need to install to add certain functionalities to your site.
- Which 3rd-party services need to be set up to get desired results
- Which settings need to be configured in order to ensure that processes will run as expected, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite involved and time-consuming. The reason why is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring a plugin, clicking on a button or two … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of a number of different components including your web server, your site, and various third-party sites …
(The configuration phase 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 something like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at these areas.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for installation purposes. What we are talking about, is configuring settings in your server specifically for handling web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic you can attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like integrating spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page error redirections, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites and services.
External Sites
The purpose of choosing external sites is that all content is published from a central location (your site) and from there, it radiates outwards automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After adding these external services to your setup, content with links pointing back to your website will get automatically published on search, social and aggregator sites. Your content and website will be exposed to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some sites and services will need to have accounts 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 before configuring your settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Search Console)
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 important information, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account is set up, your details can be used with traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s traffic performance, SEO, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account and site details, account code can be added to all pages in WordPress using a Google Analytics plugin and and fed to other useful applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account is set up, you can use this information to automate traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress provides users with a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to build a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your web traffic system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your social media accounts 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 pages and get new visitors to your site.
Set up accounts and profile pages with all the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can You can post your content to loads of social sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose those that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(You can post your content to loads of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging 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 users.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
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 social feed.
There are many different sites and platforms that can be incorporated into your own web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up external service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Web Site
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
WordPress – Global Settings
The WordPress admin area contains a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains an important and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Section)
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 specifically configured your site settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the list of services entered into the Update Services section
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is listed …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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 visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays 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 website or blog 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 here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Generally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to instantly ping various update services when a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, make sure this box is left unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion Settings
Although discussion settings 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 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 Section)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings enable your site to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings Section)
Here are some of the options for configuring your SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
We have written a detailed tutorial about using permalinks in WordPress here: How To Configure WordPress Permalinks
WordPress – Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add almost every type of functionality 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 WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is safe from being attacked.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and botnets.
To learn more, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your website more search engine friendly …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO Plugin)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google to find and index, it also lets you specify how to display your content to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can easily add social features to your site with WordPress plugins.
Most social sharing plugins let you choose which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your site which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
WordPress Traffic Generation Theme Features – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, many themes also include built-in options for improving SEO and site linking structure for faster indexing, easily add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your website is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons to enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features)
Additional Features Of WordPress To Configure For Improved Traffic
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic blueprint configuration process, are the components that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and bad traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you do any kind of business online (or are planning to), you need to ensure that your website stays compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Site Comply With The Law?)
We have written a detailed article about adding compliance pages to WordPress here:
Tags & Post Categories
WordPress tags and categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better classify and index your pages.
(Post categories help search engines classify and index your web pages, which improves traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s categories and tags should be reviewed and set up 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 categories and tags you have set up.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A site map that displays all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites discover your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. HTML site maps are web pages that provide visitors with a logical map of how your content is organized, while XML sitemaps are mostly code that only search bots can understand. Although search engines like Google can index your site just from 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 results in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – Another Source Of Web Traffic!
When online users enter the wrong web address or click on a hyperlink pointing to a page on your site that no longer exists, they are greeted with a 404 error page …
(A WordPress 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 web 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 from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your site fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do to automatically start generating new web traffic is publish great content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of various components and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take many web professionals a long time to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is covered in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive tutorial series designed to help you learn how to grow your business and drive traffic sustainably using a WordPress-powered website and proven online marketing methods.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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