Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is publish web content on a consistent basis to automatically begin attracting new traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to get started 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 site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will discuss the configuration phase of the traffic blueprint. We explain why an expertly configured site is different. You will also understand how much work needs to be done to ensure that when everything is fully set up and configured, you can automatically attract new visitors just by posting web content to your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With competition making business survival progressively tougher businesses are exploring every advantage available to get better results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge advantage over other competitors. Having an expertly configured website gives your business a flying start as soon as your website is launched.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s one way to explain the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only are more steps needed to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a little story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
Everything is going well in the widget manufacturing plant when all of a sudden, things comes to a halt.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the plant manager decides to call in an expert.
Promptly after arriving, the expert heads out immediately to the control box. After staring silently at the schematics for less than 3 minutes or so, the expert then takes out a tiny little hammer from his tool belt and makes a gentle tap about 1 inch from the right side of the unit.
Immediately, everything springs back to life.
The plant manager is grateful and relieved as he thanks the expert, who leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager receives an invoice for $5,000.
Bewildered, the manager picks up the phone and calls the expert. Why had he charged them so much for less than five minutes work? He then requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice arrives in the manager’s intray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is driving new visitors to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the plant stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have every right to get paid fairly for spending years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to quickly assess and repair a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WP website set up so all you have to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other online properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
While many experts often make complex solutions look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than installing a website and configuring a few internal settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which services need to be set up and activated to get certain results
- Which settings need to be configured to make sure things work as expected, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically difficult, it can be quite involved and complicated. It’s not as simple as installing and configuring one or two plugins, clicking a button … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of a number of different components such as your server, your web site, and various external sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If the activities involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplified flowchart of the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these steps.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for website installation purposes. We’re talking about configuring settings in your web hosting account that affect how your site will handle all web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic your business can attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like implementing spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email 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 (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and/or online services.
External Sites
The basic concept of adding external sites is that all content is published from a central location (your site) and from there, it syndicates automatically to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you add these external platforms to your system, content linked back to your site will get automatically syndicated to search, social and aggregator sites. Your website will then be exposed to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of the third-party sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site to 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:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with important data, tools and reports about your website.
Once your account and site data with Google Search Console have been set up, this information can be used with web traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s performance, SEO, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account has been set up, you can add tracking information to WordPress using any of several Google Analytics plugins and feed data instantly to other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account and entering site data with Bing, this information can be used with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers website owners a self-hosted (WordPress.org) and a hosted (WordPress.com) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your automated traffic system in the next installment of this 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 social media accounts set up before you can integrate these with 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 drive new traffic to your site.
You should have profiles with all the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose the ones that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools (we will review some of these tools in more detail in the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to loads of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of emerging technology platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress blog feed …
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 account.
There are various technologies and third-party applications that can be incorporated into your web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore your options and 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 your WordPress settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Web Site
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
Global Settings – WordPress
The WordPress administration area contains a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most powerful and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services box
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section lists only one entry …
(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
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, your choice to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could play a part in someone’s choice 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.
As far as your traffic system is concerned, however, the most important setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows your site to ping various update services when a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion
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 content, 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 Section)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
We have created a detailed tutorial about using WP permalinks here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add just about every type of functionality to your site, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
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 guaranteed immunity from a cyber attack.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to botnets and hackers.
More info:
- How To Prevent Hackers From Attacking Your Web Site With Blog Defender Security Plugin For WordPress
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your web pages …
(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 site’s search engine optimization. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines to find, classify and index, it also gives you control over how your content is presented in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with others can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins to choose from.
Most social share plugins allow you to choose which social 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 shares), etc. Some plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads 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, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, many themes also provide options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons to your website is as easy as clicking a few buttons and enabling the feature …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Configuring Other WordPress Settings
Last but not least in the web traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Compliance Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to your business when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online (or plan to), it’s important that your site complies with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Legally Compliant?)
If you need help understanding why it’s important to have a legally compliant website, see this article:
Post Tags & Post Categories
Post tags & categories help to improve your site’s SEO, which helps you get more traffic.
(WordPress post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your web pages.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to discuss and set up your website’s tags and categories earlier on, during the Website Planning Phases.
When configuring your site to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and post categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal results.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications find your web content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. Although search engines like Google can index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
Your 404 Error Page
When online users enter the wrong URL or click on links pointing to pages on your site that no longer exist, they will normally be presented with a 404 Not Found error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
A 404 Error Page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up in your server, there are several WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your website expertly configured and fully set up, all you then have to do to automatically begin attracting new traffic is add web content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of different components and web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The skills and knowledge required to perform this phase of the traffic automation process typically takes some web professionals months 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 addressed in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Part Three
To keep reading, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online and drive traffic automatically with a WordPress-powered website and proven marketing methods that are easy to implement.
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