Welcome to Part Three of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website 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 automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is publish web content regularly to begin bringing more traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed 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 things 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 how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will discuss the configuration phase of this process. The focus of this section is to help you understand what makes an expertly configured site different than a professionally configured one. You will also understand how much work is required to make sure that when everything is fully configured, you can automatically drive web traffic when you begin posting fresh content on your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic System – Configuration
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive on a global scale and are exploring any advantage they can to increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous advantage. Having an expertly configured WordPress site gives your business a flying start and a significant advantage online.
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 a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s a simple way to explain the key difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only are more steps required 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 point with a story.
Knowing Where To Tap
Everything is moving along in the widget-making plant when production suddenly comes to a complete stop.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
The expert arrives shortly afterwards and, without uttering a word, immediately walks to the control box. After staring silently at the box for no more than 2 minutes, the expert then produces a tiny little hammer and makes a gentle tap near the left side of the control unit.
Immediately, every machine in the assembly plant springs to life once again.
The plant manager is filled with joy as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the manager receives a request of payment for services for $5,000.
Angry to the point of feeling outrage, the manager calls the expert. Why have they had been charged such a ludicrous fee for so little time delivering such minimal amount of work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment 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 driving new traffic to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one in the business was able to fix it? 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 assess and avert a very serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a website or blog set up and configured so all you have to do is publish new content and search engines, social sites 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 attracting new visitors to your site?)
While experts often make complicated things look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than installing a website and configuring settings for clients. It also involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which plugins need to be installed to get desired functionalities on your site.
- Which third-party services need to be set up to achieve desired results
- Which options you need to configure in order to ensure that everything will function as planned, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this part of the traffic automation system may not seem technically challenging, it can be quite involved. It’s not as simple as installing a solution, clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of many different components such as your web server, your website or blog, and various external sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we create a simple diagram showing all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the configuration process)
Let’s examine these steps.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about tweaking settings and options in your server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your hosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic your site will attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for both good and unwanted traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like configuring spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these, the next step is to set up and configure various third-party sites and services.
External Services
The basic idea of choosing external sites is that all of your content gets published to one central location (your site) and from there, it then gets distributed automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After adding these external platforms to your traffic system, content with links pointing back to your site will get automatically published on search, social and aggregator sites. Your business will be given exposure to a new audience and source of traffic.
Some of these third-party sites and online solutions will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress 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 Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with essential information, SEO tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site data, you can use this information with web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic results, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account and site details, your account data can be easily integrated with WordPress using a simple Google Analytics plugin used with other applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account, use this information with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress offers website owners a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to build a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your web traffic system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media Pages
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site)
You will need your various social accounts set up in order to configure these as part of your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and drive new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have accounts set up with all of the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with and post your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick those that will work with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(You can syndicate your content to many social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online web platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free plans, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute your content to social networks)
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 account.
There are many different technologies and third-party applications you can incorporate into your own web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore some of these and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up third-party site accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
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.
Global Settings
The WordPress admin area contains a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and frequently overlooked traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – 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 or your webmaster have specifically chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of services entered into the Update Services field
By default, this section contains only one entry …
(WordPress Update Services)
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 Settings
This section affects how your content gets seen by visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can have an influence 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 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 website to get the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to instantly ping various update services whenever new posts get 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 Section)
Discussion Settings
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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
Here are some of the ways your search-friendly 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
Configuring Settings – Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to increase traffic
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what 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 websites.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and bots.
For more details, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(Yoast SEO – WP Plugins For SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines to find and index, it allows you to specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with members of their own online communities can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Most social sharing plugins let you specify which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings For Traffic Generation
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, many themes also include built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With many WordPress 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 System Configuration – Additional Don’t Forget These
Last (but by no means least) in the traffic configuration process, are the components that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and bad traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you make money online, you need to make sure that your site remains compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business online.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Compliant?)
For a detailed article about how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress site, go here:
Post Tags & Categories
Tags and categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your pages.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your web pages.)
As we recommend in this article, your website’s post categories and tags should be discussed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
When configuring your website to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and post categories that have been set up.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A site map that lists all of your posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools discover your website content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. Although search engines like Google can index your site just from 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 – An Additional Source Of Web Traffic!
When visitors searching for your site type in the wrong web address or click on a link pointing to a destination on your website that no longer exists, they will typically be greeted with a 404 Not Found page …
(A 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up in your server, there are plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your website has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do to automatically attract new web traffic is post great content consistently.
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 Checklist)
The kind of skills and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take some web professionals a long time to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is addressed in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read more, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive article series designed to help site owners learn how to grow their business and drive traffic sustainably with a WordPress website and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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