Welcome to Part 3 of our Web 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 series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically attract traffic is add great content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we focused on critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this section, we will discuss the configuration phase of this process. We explain how to configure a WordPress site to start driving new visitors automatically just by adding web content on a consistent basis to your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With competition becoming progressively tougher businesses are looking for any opportunity they can to increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand is a tremendous competitive advantage. For businesses, having an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start as soon as their site is launched.
The Configuration Stage 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 an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here is a simple way to describe the main difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this here’s an amusing anecdote.
Knowing Where To Tap
Everything was going well in the widget-making manufacturing plant when the machines suddenly came to a complete stop.
As no one could figure out what was wrong, the plant manager decided to call in an expert.
Soon afterward, the expert arrived and, without saying a word, headed immediately towards the control box. After staring silently at the electronic components for what seemed like 2 minutes or so, the expert then took out a tiny little hammer from his tool belt and made a very gentle tap about one cm from the left corner of the box.
Immediately, everything came back to life.
The manager was greatly relieved as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the manager received a request for payment of $5,000.
The manager picked up the phone and dialed 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 on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive new visitors to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when the machines stopped working and no one on the business had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert not have the right to get paid fairly for investing years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to immediately repair a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your website set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social followers from Facebook and LinkedIn and dozens of other web properties would be instantly notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
While the solution to many problems can seem ridiculously simple once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than installing a website and configuring a few settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which programs need to be installed for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up to get certain results
- Which settings you need to configure to ensure that everything will work to plan, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not so technically difficult, but it’s quite complicated. It’s not as easy as installing and configuring a plugin, tweaking some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of many components including your server, your web site, and various third-party sites and online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If we were to create a simple diagram showing the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic diagram of the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a brief look at what’s involved.
Web Server Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for installation purposes. What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings and options in your server that affect how your website will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web hosting account settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic you can attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for good and unwanted traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like integrating server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of third-party sites and services.
External Sites & Accounts – Configuration
The basic concept of adding external sites is that all content is posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it then gets distributed automatically to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After incorporating these external platforms into your setup, content with links pointing back to your website gets automatically posted to these platforms. Your content and business will be given additional exposure to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some of the third-party sites and online services will need to be 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:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with important information, SEO tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site data with Google Search Console, you can use the details to integrate and automate web traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account, account information can be added to WordPress via any of several Google Analytics plugins and automatically fed to 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 details have been set up, use your details to automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers users the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to grow a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your automated web traffic system in Part Four of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your various 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 accounts and drive new visitors to your site.
You should set up profiles with all of the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social sites you can set up. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick those that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we cover some of these tools in greater detail during the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to many social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online web platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary-level 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 site that lets you add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute social content to social networks)
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 RebelMouse account.
There are various solutions that can be added to your web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up third-party service accounts, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress Configuration
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.
Global WordPress Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Screen)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most powerful and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings)
As described below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have purposely chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services box
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section contains only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
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 …
(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 web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your site to view 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 traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is ticked or not.
Generally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to instantly notify various update services whenever new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion
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 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the ways site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring permalinks)
We have created a detailed tutorial on using permalinks in WordPress here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Let’s look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to attract more visitors to your site
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is completely immune from a cyber-attack.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to attacks from hackers and bots.
More information:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages more search engine friendly …
(WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help increase traffic by making your site more search engine friendly)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your website’s search engine optimization. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index, it also lets you specify how to present your content in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with others can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins available for WordPress users.
Many social share plugins allow you to specify which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring layout and design aspects of your website, many themes also provide built-in options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes like Graphene (a free theme) can be configured for better traffic results)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your pages is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Other Areas To Configure
Last but not least in the configuration process, are the areas that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Compliance 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 situations that can seriously affect your business when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of business online (or are planning to), it’s important that your site stays compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Comply With The Law?)
If you need help understanding the importance of having a compliant website, refer to this article:
Post Tags And Categories
Post categories and post tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your website.
(Categories help search engines index your web pages, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your site’s categories and tags during the Website Planning Stages.
When configuring your website or blog to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post categories and tags that have been set up.
Add A Site Map
A visitor site map that displays all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications discover more of 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 not the same thing. 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 results in increased traffic.
404 Page – Don’t Forget This!
When online users type in the wrong URL or click on a link pointing to a page on your website that no longer exists, they are presented with a 404 error page …
(A 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover 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 inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your website has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you then need to do is post content regularly to automatically attract new traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different components and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take many web professionals months to learn.
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 WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively and drive traffic organically with a WordPress-powered website and proven web marketing strategies.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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