Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a site into an automated traffic generation machine using WordPress.
In Part 1 of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to start generating more traffic is post content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, 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 existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will discuss the configuration stage of the traffic system. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that traffic will automatically start flowing whenever you add content to your web site.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business becoming ever more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth exploring any opportunity you can to improve your performance and results online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous competitive advantage. Having an expertly configured website gives you a flying start and an immediate advantage online.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
There is a significant 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 take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here’s a simple way to explain the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only are more steps required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
To illustrate this point here is a story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
Things are moving along in the gizmo-making assembly line when everything grinds to a sudden halt.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the plant manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Soon afterward, the expert arrives and immediately walks to the control box. After staring silently at the board for no more than 5 minutes or so, the expert then takes out a tiny little hammer from his utility belt and makes a gentle tap near the top-left edge of the box.
Immediately, everything starts working once again.
The manager is greatly overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the manager receives an invoice for the amount of $5,000.
With great anger, the manager dials the expert. Why did he charge them such a ridiculously high fee for less than 5 minutes work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the business had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to ask to be compensated fairly for having spent years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to immediately avert a serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a website or blog set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other online properties would be automatically 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 website?)
While many experts often make complex situations and problems look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy when you try to work things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure 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 like:
- Which plugins need to be installed to add various functionalities to your site.
- Which services need to be set up and activated to achieve desired results
- Which settings you need to configure in order to make sure things will function as expected, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically challenging, it can be quite involved and time-consuming. This is because it’s not as easy as installing and configuring a plugin, clicking a button, or tweaking some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration phase is a complex process that involves your web server, your web site, and various third-party sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic diagram of the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine what’s involved in more detail.
Web Server Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your hosting account for website installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic your business can attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for good and unwelcome traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like configuring server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
After fine-tuning your server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites.
External Sites
The basic concept of adding external sites is that all of your content will get posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will get automatically distributed to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external sites have been added to your setup, content with links pointing back to your site gets automatically published on search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and website benefits from additional exposure online, helping your business tap into a new audience and source of traffic.
Some external sites and services will need to be set up before configuring your site’s settings to 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 before configuring your WordPress site’s settings:
Google Webmasters
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly website)
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 useful information, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your account, you can use this information to integrate and automate web traffic settings and notifications 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 traffic performance, SEO, marketing campaigns, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrals, etc.
After setting up your account, your account data can be easily integrated with WordPress via plugins used with other applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account and entering site data with Bing, this information can be used to automate web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers website owners the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you are planning to grow a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your automated web traffic system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new traffic to your site)
You will need your social accounts set up 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 and social bookmarking accounts and bring new traffic to your site.
You should have accounts and profile pages with all the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can set up accounts with and syndicate your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select those that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(You can post your content to many social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online web platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your own RebelMouse account.
There are many different sites and platforms that can be added to your web traffic system. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with third-party sites, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress Traffic 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 of the important points.
WordPress – Global Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress admin 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 automated traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings)
As described below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have specifically chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the update services entered into the Update Services section
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section lists only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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 on this page can have an influence traffic. For example, your choice to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website to read the rest of the content from summaries, 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 in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Generally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to instantly notify various update services when a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Screen)
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 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)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
We have created a detailed tutorial on using permalinks in WordPress here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks
Configuring Settings – Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality imaginable to your site, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Let’s look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is safe from being attacked by hackers.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
Go here for more information:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your website more search engine friendly …
(Yoast SEO – WP Plugin)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines to find and index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online 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 site easily with WordPress plugins)
There are many free or inexpensive social sharing plugins available for WordPress.
Most social sharing plugins let you select which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your site which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, many themes also give you options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) can be configured for better traffic results)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your website is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons to configure your options and enable the function …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure For Increased Traffic
Last but not least in the traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with good and unwanted traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you do business online, it’s important that your website remains compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business practices online.
(Is Your Website Legally Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article on why it’s important to have a compliant website here:
Categories & Tags
Post categories & tags help search engines better classify and index your pages, which helps you get more traffic.
(WordPress categories help to improve your site’s search optimization, which improves traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and post categories should be discussed and set up during the Website Planning Stage.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories you have 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, it can also help external tools find your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Only search engines can read XML sitemaps. Although search engines like Google will index your site just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin 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 Not Found – A Source Of Lost Traffic Opportunities!
When visitors searching online for your site enter the wrong web address into their web browser or click on a link pointing to an incorrect destination on your site, they are presented with a 404 Not Found page …
(A 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up in your server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your website or blog expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then is post great content on a regular basis to begin attracting new web traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of different components and external web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of skills and knowledge required to perform this process typically takes some website developers a long time to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as you can. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of articles designed to help website owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively with a WordPress-driven website and proven web marketing methods.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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