Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a site into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and 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 is publish new content regularly to bring web traffic!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase. We explained the best way to start 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 website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic automation process. We explain how to configure a WordPress site to bring visitors automatically when you begin to add new content on your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Also, the business landscape is becoming ever more competitive on a global scale and businesses are researching any advantage they believe will help them increase their competitiveness online.
Having the ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge competitive advantage. For business owners, an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start from the moment their website is launched.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to explain the difference:
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 with a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only are more steps required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing little story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All was humming along in the widget workshop when everything suddenly came to a stop.
As no one could figure out what was wrong, the plant manager decided to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert went immediately to the control box. After staring silently at the box for no more than 5 minutes or so, the expert then took out a tiny hammer from his tool box and made a single tap about one inch from the right-hand corner of the control unit.
Immediately, everything came back to life.
The manager was overjoyed 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 factory manager dialled the expert, demanding to know why the expert had charged them such an exorbitant fee for less than five minutes work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice arrived on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive traffic to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when the machines ground to a halt and no one in the business was able to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to ask to be compensated fairly for years spent developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to immediately assess and fix a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your site fully set up and configured so all you had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest 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 attracting new visitors to your site?)
Although the solution to many problems is often 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 adding some pages with content and configuring settings for clients. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install to add certain functionalities to your site.
- Which services you need to set up to achieve specific results
- Which settings need to be configured to ensure that everything works exactly as you have envisioned, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this part of the traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite involved. It’s not just about installing a plugin, clicking on a button or two … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration stage is a complex process that involves your server, your site, and various third-party sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram of all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at these areas in more detail.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings in your server specifically for handling web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic your website will attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like integrating spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess and 404 redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After your server settings have been fine-tuned and configured (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and services.
External Sites & Solutions – Configuration
The idea behind setting up external sites is that all content should be published from a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, syndicate automatically to other components of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After adding these external services to your traffic network, content linked back to your site is automatically added to search, social and aggregator sites. Your content and business will benefit from added exposure online, helping your business tap into a new audience and traffic source.
Some external sites and online services will need to be set up before configuring your site’s settings to speed up the process 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 before configuring your site’s settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console)
Google Search Console lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with a range of important information, SEO tools and reports about your website.
Once your account and site data have been set up, you can use your information to integrate and automate traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. 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, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrals, etc.
After setting up your account and site details, you can add tracking code to WordPress via a plugin and feed data instantly to other online applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your Bing Webmaster Tools account and entering site data, your information can be used with web traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your traffic system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media Pages
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need to have already set up your various social media accounts before you can 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 get new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have accounts and pages set up with all the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social sites you can You can syndicate your content to many social bookmarking sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose those that will work well with your system and/or content syndication tools.
(You can post your content to many social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add a feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute social content to social networks)
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 own RebelMouse social feed.
There are various technologies and third-party applications that can be added to your web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure your site.
Configuring Your WordPress Site
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global Settings
The WordPress administration area contains a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Section)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains an important and often overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Area)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely configured your settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the update services entered into the Update Services text box
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is available …
(Writing Settings – Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(You can 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 visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence web traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could play a part in someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your site to read the rest of the content from a partial feed, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The main setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables your site to automatically ping various update services when a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion Settings
Although this section is mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs 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 Section)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow you to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s permalinks …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
For a detailed tutorial about setting up permalinks, go here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks
WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins – Configuration
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your site, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help your site generate more traffic
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 blog is completely safe from being attacked by hackers.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to hackers and bots.
More info:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving improving how search engines like Google and Bing find, classify and index your website …
(WordPress Plugin – Yoast SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines to index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can easily add social sharing to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Most social plugins let you choose which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your site which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress Traffic Theme Settings – 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 layout and design elements of your site, many themes also provide built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site linking structure for faster indexing, add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a free theme) allow you to configure settings and options for better traffic results)
With many themes, adding social sharing features to your site is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic System – Additional Configuration Areas
Last but not least in the web traffic configuration process, are the elements 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 numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle good and unwanted traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to your business as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you are making money online, you need to ensure that your website is compliant with all regulations.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
If you need help understanding why it’s important to have a legally compliant website, see this article:
Categories & Tags
Tags and categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your web pages.
(WordPress post categories help search engines index your web pages, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s categories and tags should be set up during the Website Planning Stages.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and categories have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits.
Add A Site Map
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 tools discover your web content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. HTML site maps are web pages that link to all other content on your site and provide readers with a an understandable map of how your content is structured, while XML sitemaps are mostly code that only search engines can understand. Although Google can index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – Don’t Forget This!
When visitors enter the wrong web address or click on an invalid hyperlink, they are greeted with a 404 error page …
(A 404 Error Page)
A 404 page can be turned into a useful source of traffic to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error page can be set up in your web server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your website has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then is add great content regularly to automatically begin attracting more traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different components and web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take many web professionals a long time to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is explained in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read more, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of articles designed to help website owners learn how to grow their business and drive traffic automatically with a WordPress website and proven marketing methods that are easy to implement.
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