Welcome to Part Three of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your website using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is publish content on a consistent basis to automatically attract web traffic!)
In Part Two, 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 with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration stage of the traffic system. You will understand what makes an expertly configured site different than a professionally configured site, and what kind of work needs to be done to make sure that when everything is set up and configured, traffic will automatically start flowing when you post new content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by business owners as their greatest challenge online. Businesses are becoming increasingly more competitive and are researching any opportunity they can to increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge competitive advantage. Having an expertly configured website gives you a flying start and a significant advantage online.
The Configuration Stage Is What Makes The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site 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 differences:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does a whole lot more labor go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special type of expert knowledge.
Let me illustrate this point with a little story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All was moving along in the widget-making factory when all of a sudden, things ground to a stop.
No one could figure out what happened and so the plant manager decided to call in an expert.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrived and immediately went towards the control box. After staring silently at the wiring board for 2 minutes or less, the expert then took out a teeny-weeny hammer and made a gentle tap about 1 inch from the right edge of the control unit.
Immediately, everything returned once again to normal.
The floor manager was grateful and relieved as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager received a request for payment of $5,000.
The manager dialed the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged such a ludicrous fee for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of work and promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrived and was placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic consistently to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one in the business was able to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for years spent building up the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to immediately repair a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress blog set up so all you have to do is publish content to it and search engines, social followers from Facebook and LinkedIn and dozens of other traffic-generating 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 site?)
Although many experts often make difficult solutions look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than installing a website and configuring a few settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs need to be installed for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which 3rd-party services you need to set up to achieve desired results
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure to ensure that everything works to plan, etc.
(Driving 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 involved. It’s not as easy as installing and configuring a solution, clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many different parts including your web hosting server, your web site, and a number of external sites and services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine what’s involved.
Your Web Server – Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for installation purposes. What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings in your server that affect how your website will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, 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 spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both good and bad traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like implementing server-level spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, 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 a number of external sites and services.
External Accounts
The purpose of adding external sites is that all content should be published from a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, get distributed 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 traffic system, content linking back to your website is automatically posted to these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social sites, even to visitors attracted to the platform itself. Your content and business will be given exposure to a new audience and source of traffic.
Some sites will need to be set up before configuring your settings to help save time 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 before configuring your WordPress site’s settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell 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 Google Search Console account and site data have been set up, this information can be used with web traffic-related 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 traffic results, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your account and site details, visitor tracking data can be easily integrated with WordPress using a plugin used with other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account with Bing, you can use the information to integrate and automate web traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to grow a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your web traffic generation 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 bring new visitors to your site)
You will need your social accounts set up in order to 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 get new traffic to your site.
You should set up accounts with all of the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can You can syndicate your content to many social sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick the ones that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(You can post your content to loads of social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online web platforms and content aggregators that can act as second-tier 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 allows you to add an RSS feed from your WordPress blog …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute your content to social networks)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your page.
There are various sites and platforms that can be incorporated into your own traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore this area further and discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with third-party sites, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global WordPress Settings
The WordPress administration area contains a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and often overlooked traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Section)
As described in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of update services entered into the Update Services section
By default, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(You can 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, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS readers 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 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 here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to automatically ping various update services whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Global 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 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)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the ways site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring permalinks)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about setting up WordPress permalinks, go here: Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs
Plugin Settings
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for handling 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 simply cannot ignore the importance of securing your website or blog.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to bots and hackers.
Go here for more info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages easy for search engines like Google and Bing to find, crawl and index …
(WP SEO Plugin – Yoast SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to find, crawl and index, it also lets you specify how to display your content to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with others can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you post content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with WordPress plugins.
Most social plugins let you choose 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 plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which users can unlock by liking your page.
Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, some themes also give you options for improving SEO and site linking structure for faster indexing, easily add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing features to your content is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Other Areas To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to your business as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you engage in any form of business online, you need to ensure that your website complies with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?)
We have written a detailed article about adding compliance pages to WordPress here:
Post Tags & Categories
Post categories & tags help search engines better organize and index your website, which improves traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s SEO.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to discuss and set up your website’s post tags and categories during the Website Planning Phase.
When looking at ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s categories and tags 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 site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools find more of your web content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. Although search engines like Google will index your site 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.
404 Error Page – Don’t Lose Traffic!
When visitors searching online for your website enter the wrong web address into their browser or click on links pointing to pages on your website that no longer exist, they will typically be presented with an error page (known as a 404 Not Found page) …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error page can be set up on your web server, there are plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then to automatically start generating new traffic is post content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take many web professionals months to learn.
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 addressed in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This tutorial is part of an article series designed to help site owners learn how to grow their business online cost-effectively and drive traffic organically with a WordPress website and proven marketing methods that are easy and quick to implement.
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