Welcome to Part Three of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new visitors automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to automatically bring more web traffic is add fresh content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start 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 has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we will look at the configuration stage of this process. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site so you can automatically bring web traffic just by adding fresh content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by business owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Also, the business landscape is becoming so much more competitive on a global scale and businesses are researching any and every opportunity they can to increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous competitive advantage. Having an expertly configured website gives your business a flying start and an immediate competitive advantage online.
The Configuration Process Is What Makes All The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to describe the main difference:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special type of expertise.
To illustrate this here’s a story.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
All was going just fine in the gizmo assembly line when everything ground to a sudden halt.
As no one could figure out what went wrong, the plant manager decided to call in an expert.
Soon afterward, the expert arrived and headed immediately towards the control box. After staring silently at the schematics for what seemed like about 5 minutes, the expert then took out a little hammer from his tool box and made a very gentle tap near the left edge of the box.
Immediately, everything returned to normal.
The floor manager was greatly relieved as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the manager received an invoice for $5,000.
The factory manager called the expert, demanding to know why the expert had charged them such a ludicrous fee for less than 5 minutes work. He then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrived on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive new traffic to their sites.
How much money did the plant stand to lose when production stopped working and no one in the factory floor had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to ask to be compensated fairly for years spent building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to assess and repair a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your WP web site configured so all you have to do is publish content to it and search engines, social media and dozens of other online properties would be automatically 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 website?)
While many experts often make complicated solutions look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring basic settings. It also involves 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 services need to be set up to get desired outcomes
- Which settings you need to configure in order to ensure that everything will work as envisioned, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite involved. It’s not as simple as installing a plugin, clicking on a button or two … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a process that involves your web hosting server, your website or blog, and various external sites …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we were to create a simple diagram of the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine what’s involved.
Your Web Server – Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your hosting account for installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is configuring settings and options in your web-hosting account 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 can attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for both good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like configuring spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these, the next step is to configure a number of third-party sites.
External Accounts
The purpose of adding external sites is that all content will get posted to one central location (your site) and from there, it will get distributed automatically to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you add these external platforms to your configuration, content linking back to your site will be automatically posted to search, social and aggregator sites. Your content and site will be exposed to a new audience and new sources of traffic.
Some external sites and solutions will need to be set up before configuring your site to help speed up the configuration 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 settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of useful information, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your account has been with Google are set up, you can use this information to automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s results, SEO, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
After setting up your account and site data, you can add visitor tracking code to WordPress using plugins and send data instantly to various other online applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account, this information can be used to automate web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers users 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 web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, 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 And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and attract new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social media accounts set up in order to configure these as part of 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.
Set up accounts and profiles with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick those that will work well with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(You can post your content to lots of social bookmarking sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online web platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add an RSS feed from your WordPress blog …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute your content to social networks)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your own RebelMouse account.
There are many different technologies and third-party applications you can incorporate into your traffic system. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure WordPress.
Configuring WordPress For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global WordPress Settings
By default, your WordPress dashboard area includes a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most powerful and often overlooked traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As stated in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have purposely configured your settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services box
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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 in this section can influence traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could play a part in someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your 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.
The main setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to ping your update services list whenever a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit 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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the ways SEO-friendly URLs can be configured …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
If you need help setting up permalinks in WordPress, refer to this step-by-step tutorial: Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks
Configuring Settings – Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to attract more visitors to your site
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you simply cannot ignore the importance of securing your websites.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to hackers and bots.
Go here to learn more:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website …
(WP Plugin – Yoast SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to index, it allows you to specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Most social sharing plugins allow you to choose 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 plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which users can unlock by liking your page.
Configuring Settings – 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 give you built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons to your content is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic System Configuration – Other Areas
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic system configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you do any type of business online (or plan to), you need to ensure that your site is found to comply with all government laws and regulations.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article on adding compliance pages to WordPress here:
Post Categories And Tags
WordPress categories and tags help improve traffic by improving your site’s search engine optimization.
(Categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your pages.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and post categories should be discussed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phases.
When configuring your website to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the tags and categories you have set up.
Site Map
A site map that lists all of your posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites discover your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. HTML site maps are web pages that provide readers with a an understandable representation of how your content is structured, while XML sitemaps are mostly code that only search engines can understand. Although search engines like Google will index your site just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Your WordPress 404 Page Not Found
When visitors searching for your site enter the wrong web address into their web browser or click on an invalid hyperlink, they will typically be presented with an error page …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 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 plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you then have to do is add great content on a consistent basis to begin attracting web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of various components and external web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take many web developers a long time to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is covered in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help business owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively and drive traffic automatically using a WordPress website and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
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