Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic generation machine using the WordPress CMS.
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 site, all you have to do is add great content consistently to begin attracting more web traffic!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase of the automation process. We explained 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 site was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we look at the configuration stage of the traffic automation process. We explain what makes an expertly configured site different from a professionally configured one. You will also understand how much work is required to ensure that when everything is set up and fully configured, you can attract traffic automatically as you start to publish web content to your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic System – Configuration
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as their greatest challenge online. With business getting increasingly more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth looking into any advantage available to improve your results and performance online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous competitive advantage. With an expertly configured WordPress site, you have a flying start from the moment your website is launched.
The Configuration Stage 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’s one way to explain the differences:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence plus an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does it take more labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special type of expertise.
Allow me to illustrate this with an anecdote.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All is working according to schedule in the widget-making plant when production suddenly stops.
No one can figure out what’s gone wrong and so the manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert immediately goes towards the main control box. After staring silently at the wires and circuitry for 3 minutes or so, the expert then produces a teensy-weensy little hammer from his tool box and makes a very gentle tap about three inches from the right side of the control unit.
Immediately, everything returns to normal.
The manager is relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a service bill for $5,000.
Bewildered, the factory manager picks up the phone and rings the expert. Why were they charged so much for less than five minutes work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice arrives and is placed in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving new visitors to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when the machines stopped working and no one in the factory floor had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to demand fair compensation for investing years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly assess and avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WP web site fully configured so all you have to do is publish content to it and search engines, social followers from Facebook and Twitter and dozens of other traffic-generating web 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 driving traffic to your website?)
While many experts often make complex things look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy when you try to figure things out.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than installing a website and configuring a few basic settings. It involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install to get various functionalities on your site.
- Which third-party services you need to set up and activate to achieve specific results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured to ensure that things work as planned, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite complicated. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing and configuring a solution, configuring some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration stage is a complex process that involves your web hosting server, your website, and a number of third-party sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we try to flowchart the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram of the configuration process)
Let’s examine these steps in more detail.
Your Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is tweaking settings in your server that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your web hosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic your site will attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for good and unwelcome traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like integrating server-level spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess and error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting 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 a number of third-party sites.
External Web Properties & Services – Configuration
The basic idea of setting up external sites is that all content will be posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will get distributed automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you incorporate these external sites into your configuration, content linked back to your website gets automatically syndicated to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content will then receive exposure online, helping your business tap into new sources of traffic.
Some of the third-party sites will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site’s settings to help speed up the configuration process 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 site’s settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with a range of essential information, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account and site data with Google Search Console have been set up, you can use this information to automate web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrals, etc.
After setting up your up your account and entered your site details, traffic monitoring data can be integrated with WordPress using plugins and automatically sent to other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account, you can use this information with web traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress provides users with a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to grow a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. 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 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 get new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social media and social bookmarking accounts set up before you can 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 visitors to your site.
You should have accounts with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up. You don’t need to go crazy, just select those that will work well with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(You can syndicate your content to loads of social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online web platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free levels, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your RebelMouse website.
There are various solutions that can be incorporated into your traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore some of these and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up third-party service accounts, 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
The WordPress admin area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains an important and often overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(Global 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 have specifically chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of services entered into the Update Services text area
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section contains only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(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 readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can have an influence traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your site to view the rest of the content from summaries, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting in this section as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to notify your update services list when a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, make sure this box is left unchecked …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings)
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 blogs 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 Section)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow your site to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks Screen)
Here are some of the ways permalink URLs can be configured …
(Configuring post permalinks)
To learn more about setting up permalinks in WordPress, see this tutorial: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to bring 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. No blog is guaranteed immunity from being attacked by hackers.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and botnets.
Go here to learn more:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your web pages …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress Plugins For SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO can significantly improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find, crawl and index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily with WordPress plugins)
You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with free or inexpensive 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 notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which users can unlock by liking your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring layout and design aspects of your website, some themes also give you built-in options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your website is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features)
Configuring Other WordPress Sections For Traffic
Last but not least in the traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Compliance Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and bad traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you are making money online (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your site is found to comply with government regulations.
(Does Your Site Comply With The Law?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, go here:
WordPress Categories And Tags
Tags and categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your web pages.
(WordPress post categories help search engines classify and index your website, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s post tags and post categories should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories that have been set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
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 sites discover more of 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 not the same things. Only search engines can understand an XML sitemap. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which plugins 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.
Your WordPress 404 Page Not Found
When visitors searching online for your website type in the wrong web address or click on a hyperlink pointing to a destination on your website that no longer exists, they are presented with an error page …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up on your web server, there are several plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then is post fresh content consistently to automatically drive more web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different elements and web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of skills and knowledge involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some web developers 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 article in our series.
This is the end of Section Three
To continue reading, click on the link below:
This article is part of an article series designed to help you learn how to grow your business and drive traffic automatically with a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven marketing methods that are easy and quick to implement.
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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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