Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic generation machine using WordPress.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is add new content on a regular basis to automatically begin attracting traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In this section, we will look at the configuration stage of this process. You will learn how a WordPress site should be configured in order to ensure that visitors will automatically start flowing just by publishing content to your website.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With competition becoming progressively tougher businesses are looking for any advantage available to increase their competitiveness online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge advantage over other competitors. For business owners, an expertly configured website means having an immediate competitive advantage from the very beginning.
The Configuration Stage Is What Makes All The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to describe the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a web presence plus an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only is extra work required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this here’s an anecdote.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
Things were going well in the gizmo assembly plant when everything suddenly came to a halt.
No one could figure out what happened and so the plant manager decided to call in an expert.
Promptly after arriving, the expert headed immediately towards the main control box. After staring silently at the box for about 2 minutes, the expert then produced a tiny little hammer from his pocket and made a very gentle tap about one inch from the right edge of the box.
Immediately, the plant sprang to life once again.
The plant manager was delighted as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager received a request for payment of $5,000.
The manager dialled the expert, demanding to know why he had charged them such a ludicrous fee for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work and 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 #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive traffic to their sites.
How much money did the factory stand to lose when the machines stopped functioning and no one in the business had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have the right to demand fair compensation for having invested years developing the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to quickly assess and repair a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your WP website configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and search engines, social sites and dozens of other online properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your website?)
Although experts often make complex things 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 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 accounts you need to set up to achieve certain results
- Which options need to be configured to ensure that things will function as envisioned, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the traffic automation system may not seem so technically difficult, it can be quite complicated. This is because it’s not just about installing a plugin, clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration stage is a process that involves your web server, your WordPress site, and various third-party sites or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we were to create a simple flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram showing the configuration phase)
Let’s examine what’s involved in more detail.
Web Hosting
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 tweaking settings and options in your web server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web-hosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic your website may attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and online services.
Integration With External Services
The idea behind choosing external sites is that all content will be published to a central location (your site) and from there, it will radiate outwards automatically to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After incorporating these external sites into your configuration, content linked back to your site will get automatically fed to search, social and aggregator sites. Your site will then be given exposure to a new audience and new sources of traffic.
Some of these sites will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site’s settings 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 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 useful information, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your Google Webmaster Tools account is set up, use the account information to automate traffic settings 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 efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, visitor tracking code can be added to all of your pages in WordPress using any of several Google Analytics plugins and automatically sent to other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account and entering site data, this information can be used with traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers website owners a hosted and a self-hosted option. 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 can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your automated traffic generation system in Part Four of this article series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your social accounts before you can 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 bring new visitors to your site.
You should have pages set up with all of the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can You can syndicate your content to lots of social bookmarking sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we will review some of these tools in more detail during the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to many social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different user types.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your website.
There are various solutions that can be incorporated into your web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore this area further and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website
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 key areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
The WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains an important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings)
As stated in this 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 notify the list of update services entered into the Update Services box
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is listed …
(WordPress Update Services)
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 your content gets seen by readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can have an influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to view 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 in this section as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to automatically notify 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, do not check this box …
(WordPress 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 sites 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow your site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the options for configuring your search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
For a detailed tutorial about setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add just about every type 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 attract more visitors to your site
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with 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 cannot ignore the importance of securing your site.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to attacks from hackers and botnets.
For more details, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages easily indexable …
(Yoast SEO – WP Plugin)
A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find, crawl and index, it also lets you specify how to present your content to 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 to increase traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with free or inexpensive plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using WordPress plugins.
Many social plugins let you specify which 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 ‘lock’ content or downloads which users can unlock by sharing your page.
WordPress Traffic Generation Theme Settings – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, many themes also include built-in options for improving SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) include built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your pages is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic – 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 the following:
Compliance Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with good and unwelcome 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 business online, it’s important that your website stays compliant with all regulations.
(Is Your Site Compliant?)
If you need help understanding the importance of having a legally compliant website, go here:
Post Tags And Categories
WordPress tags & post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s SEO.
(WordPress categories help to improve your site’s SEO, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to discuss and set up your website’s post tags and categories during the Website Planning Process.
When considering ways to automate and improve 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 benefits.
A Site Map Of Your Pages and Posts
A site map that lists all of your posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools find your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. HTML site maps are web pages that link to all other content on your site and provide users with a visual map of how your content is organized, while XML sitemaps are mostly code that only search bots can read. Although search engines like Google will index your site just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Don’t Forget Your Site’s 404 Page Not Found
When visitors searching online for your website type in the wrong URL or click on a link pointing to a page on your site that no longer exists, they are greeted with an error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
A 404 Not Found error page can be turned into a useful source of traffic to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your server, there are plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do is add fresh content on a regular basis to attract web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of various components and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many website professionals months to acquire.
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 series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive tutorial series aimed at helping small business owners learn how to grow their business online cost-effectively with a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven web marketing methods.
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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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