Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this article 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 to attract new web traffic is add great content consistently!)
In Part 2, we discussed critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will look at the configuration stage of the traffic system. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that new traffic will automatically start flowing simply by consistently adding web content to your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive worldwide and are researching any advantage available to improve their performance online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand is a tremendous advantage. An expertly configured WordPress site gives you an immediate advantage from the word “go”.
Configuration Is 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 builder but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to understand the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing story.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
All is humming along in the gizmo workshop when things grind to a sudden halt.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the plant manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrives and, without uttering a word, goes immediately to the main control box. After staring silently at the wiring diagrams for what seems like 3 minutes, the expert then takes out a little hammer and makes a very gentle tap about 1 cm from the bottom-left edge of the unit.
Immediately, everything springs to life again.
The floor manager is delighted as he thanks the expert, who leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager receives a bill for $5,000.
Angrily, the manager picks up the phone and dials the expert. Demanding to know why they were charged so much for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives and is placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on 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 having invested years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to immediately assess and avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a WP website or blog set up so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social networks and dozens of other web properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
While the solution to many challenges often seems quite 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 installing a website and configuring site settings for clients. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up and activated to get certain outcomes
- Which options you need to configure to ensure that processes will run to plan, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not technically difficult, but it’s quite involved. The reason why is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring a piece of software, configuring some options and settings in your admin area or clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration phase involves the integration of many components such as your web server, your WordPress site, and a number of third-party sites and services …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these areas in more detail.
Your Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for site installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings and options in your web hosting account that affect how your site will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic you may attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like configuring server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess and error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirections, etc?)
After your web server settings have been checked and configured, the next step is to configure various third-party sites and services.
External Services
The basic idea of setting up external sites is that all content will be posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will get syndicated automatically to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you incorporate these external services into your configuration, content with links pointing back to your site is automatically syndicated to these platforms. Your site receives increased exposure online, helping your business tap into new sources of traffic.
Some sites will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site to help 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:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmaster Tools 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 diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account has been with Google are set up, this information can be used to integrate and automate traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic performance, SEO, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account has been set up, visitor tracking information can be added to all web pages in WordPress using any of several Google Analytics plugins used with other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your Bing Webmaster Tools account, use the details with 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 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 business presence online.
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 these features into your automated web traffic generation system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need to set up your social media accounts 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 attract new traffic to your site.
You should have accounts and profiles set up with all the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can set up. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose the ones that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(There are loads of social sites you can post your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add an RSS feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your own RebelMouse social feed.
There are many different platforms that can be added to your own web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up accounts with third-party services, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
WordPress Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains an important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As described in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have specifically configured your site settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services text area
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section lists only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress!)
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 in this section can influence traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could play a part in someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your 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.
As far as your traffic system is concerned, however, the main setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to automatically ping the list of update services whenever new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Section)
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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings Screen)
Here are some of the options for configuring your permalink URLs …
(Configuring post permalinks)
We have written a detailed tutorial about using WordPress permalinks here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring Settings – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality imaginable to your site, including traffic generation.
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 site for dealing with the effects of 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 afford to ignore the importance of securing your website.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to botnet and hacker attacks.
More info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive traffic by making your website more search engine friendly)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index, it also lets you specify how to present your content in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with their friends and members of their social networks can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins.
Many 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 social share plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring Settings – Themes
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 site, some themes also include built-in features that let you improve SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) allow you to configure options and settings for improved traffic results)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your pages is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic Configuration – Other Sections
Last but not least in the web traffic configuration process, are the components that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Legal 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 good and bad 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 (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your website remains compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business online.
(Does Your Site Comply With The Law?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, go here:
Tags & Post Categories
Tags & post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s SEO.
(Categories help to improve your site’s SEO, which improves traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s post tags and categories during the Website Planning Phases.
When configuring your web site to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and post categories have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits.
A Site Map Of Your Pages and Posts
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 discover 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 different things. Although search engines like Google can 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 can result in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – Don’t Forget This!
When visitors searching online for your site type in the wrong URL into their browser or click on an invalid link, they will normally be presented with a 404 error page …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up in your server, there are plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your website has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do then is publish web content on a regular basis to attract new traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of various elements and web properties …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some web developers a long time to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is addressed in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read more, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business using a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven marketing strategies that are easy to implement.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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