Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive traffic automatically to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is post new content on a consistent basis to automatically attract new web traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase of the automation process. We helped you understand 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 site, and what to do if your existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In this article, we look at the configuration phase of this process. You will learn how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that traffic will automatically start flowing simply by consistently publishing web content to your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business getting so much more competitive worldwide, it’s worth exploring any advantage that can help you get better results online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand is a huge advantage. For WordPress users, an expertly configured website allows their business to get off with a flying start from the moment their website is launched.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a 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 its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to describe the difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only are more steps 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.
A Semi-True Story …
All is humming along in the gizmo-making plant when production suddenly comes to a halt.
As no one can figure out what’s gone wrong, the floor manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert goes directly to the main control box. After staring at the board for 2 minutes or so, the expert then produces a tiny hammer from his pocket and makes a single tap near the left edge of the unit.
Immediately, the whole workshop lights up and springs back to life.
The plant manager is overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager receives an invoice for $5,000.
Angry and bordering on a sense of outrage, the factory manager calls the expert. Demanding to know why they were charged such a large amount of money for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one in the factory floor was able to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for years spent developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to avert a serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a blog set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other web 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 driving traffic to your site?)
Although the solution to many challenges often seems quite simple once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than installing a website and configuring a few settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed to get various functionalities on your site.
- Which 3rd-party services you need to set up and activate to achieve specific results
- Which settings need to be configured in order to ensure that everything will function to plan, etc.
(Driving web 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 complicated. This is because it’s not as easy as installing a plugin, clicking a button … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration stage is a complex process that involves your web hosting server, your website or blog, and a number of third-party sites and services …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If the activities involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Your Web Server – Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes. What we are talking about, is configuring settings and options in your server specifically for handling web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web server 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 business can attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for both good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like configuring server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up 404 error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of external sites.
External Web Properties & Solutions – Configuration
The purpose of adding external sites is that all content will be published from one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will get automatically distributed to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After incorporating these external services into your system, content linking back to your website will be automatically published on search, social and aggregator sites. Your content and website will be given added exposure to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of these sites and online services will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress site to save time 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 Webmasters
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmasters lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with important information, tools, and reports about their website.
Once your Google Search Console account has been set up, this information can be used with web traffic-related 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 activities, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrers, etc.
After setting up your up your account and site data has been entered, you can add tracking code to all of your web pages in WordPress using any of several Google Analytics plugins and send data automatically to many other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account, this information can be used with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) 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 version if you plan to grow a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which can be accessed by various 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
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social media and social bookmarking 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 accounts and attract new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have set up profiles with all the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are many social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(You can post your content to lots of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add a feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your page.
There are various sites and platforms you can add to your own web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your 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.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
The WordPress admin area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most powerful and often overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
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 intentionally chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services section
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
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 Settings
This section affects how your content gets seen by visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can have an influence traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to read the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The main setting in this section as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is ticked or not.
Normally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to automatically notify all the update services you have listed whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, make sure this box is left 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 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 create SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s post permalinks …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
If you need help setting up permalinks, go here: Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks
Configuring WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add just about every kind of functionality to your website, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to bring more visitors to your site
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for dealing with 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, you cannot ignore the importance of securing your websites.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
To learn more, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web content more indexable …
(SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your site more search engine friendly)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines to index, it allows you to configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
There are many social sharing plugins to choose from.
Many social plugins allow you to 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 shares), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which users can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress – Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, many themes also provide options for improving SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a free theme) include built-in traffic optimization features)
With many themes, adding social sharing features to your pages is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)
Configuring Other Features Of WordPress
Last (but by no means least) in the configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle good and unwelcome 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, you need to make sure that your site stays compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Site Comply With The Law?)
For a detailed article about how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website or blog, go here:
WordPress Tags And Categories
Tags & categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.
(Post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s post tags and post categories during the Website Planning Stages.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the tags and categories that have been set up.
Add A Site Map
A site map that displays 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 site’s content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. HTML site maps are web pages that provide users with a visual map of how your content is structured, while XML sitemaps are mostly code that only search bots can read. Although search engines like Google will index your site just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Page – Don’t Forget This!
When visitors searching online for your website type in the wrong URL or click on a dead hyperlink, they are greeted with an error page …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your web server, there are several WordPress plugins 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 fully set up and expertly configured, all you then need to do to automatically begin bringing new traffic is publish new content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different components and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The skills and knowledge required to perform the configuration process typically takes some web developers a long time to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is addressed in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part Three
To continue reading, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive tutorial series aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively with a WordPress-powered website and proven online marketing strategies.
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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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