Welcome to Part Three of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to start generating more traffic is add web content consistently!)
In Part Two, we looked at critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration phase of this process. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site so you can automatically get traffic as you start to add fresh content on your site.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. With business becoming ever more competitive worldwide, it’s worth exploring any opportunity you can to get better results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous advantage over the competition. For businesses, an expertly configured website means having an immediate advantage from the very start.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here is a simple way to understand the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does it take more labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special type of expertise.
Let me illustrate this point with an anecdote.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
Everything was going just fine in the widget assembly line when suddenly, things stopped.
As no one could figure out what happened, the plant manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert immediately walked to the control box. After staring at the wires and circuitry for about 3 minutes or so, the expert then took out a teeny-weeny hammer from his pocket and made a gentle tap about one and half cm from the right side of the unit.
Immediately, the assembly line started working as before.
The manager was relieved as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager received an invoice for $5,000.
The manager rang back the expert, demanding to know why they were expected to pay so much for less than 5 minutes work and then 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 main challenge most businesses face online is driving new traffic to their sites.
How much money did the plant stand to lose when the equipment stopped functioning and no one on the factory floor was able to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to demand fair compensation for years spent developing the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and avert a serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your website configured so all you had to do is publish new content and search engines, social networking sites and dozens of other online 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 the solution to many challenges may seem quite simple once it’s been implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves 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 desired functionalities to your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up and activated to achieve specific outcomes
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured to ensure that things will function as planned, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this part of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically challenging, it can be quite involved. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing one or two plugins, clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of different components including your server, your web site, and a number of external sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we create a simplified flowchart of all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing all the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these steps.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes. What we are talking about, is tweaking settings and options in your web server that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(During 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 traffic you will attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like server-level spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
After fine-tuning your server settings and configuring these, the next step is to configure a number of third-party sites and services.
External Sites
The purpose of choosing external sites is that all of your content should be published to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, be distributed automatically to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you incorporate these external platforms into your network, content with links pointing back to your site gets automatically syndicated to search, social and aggregator sites. Your content and site will then receive additional exposure online, helping you tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some sites and online solutions will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site to speed up the process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts:
Google Search Console
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of useful information, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your account, this information can be used to integrate and automate web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data are set up, you can add traffic monitoring code to all of your web pages in WordPress via a simple plugin and feed data automatically to other online applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account is set up, this information can be used to automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers users a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to build a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your traffic system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your various social accounts before you can integrate these with your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring 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 profiles set up with all the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick those that will work with your system and/or content sharing tools (we discuss some of these tools in greater detail further below and during the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to many social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different users.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your website.
There are many different solutions that can be incorporated into your 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 external service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
Configuring Your WordPress Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress Settings
By default, your WordPress admin area includes a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As described in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have intentionally configured your settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services section
By default, this section includes only one entry …
(WordPress Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress – just add a list of all the update services you want to notify as soon as you publish a new post to this section …
(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 have an influence web traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could impact 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 main setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to automatically notify all the update services you have listed when new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion Settings
Although the settings in this section 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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow your site to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings Section)
Here are some of the ways search-friendly URLS can be configured …
(Configuring post permalinks)
If you need help setting up permalinks, see this step-by-step tutorial: Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings For Traffic Generation
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that can 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 examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help improve traffic generation
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No website is completely safe from being attacked by hackers.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to hackers and bots.
More info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages easily indexable …
(WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google 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. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you post content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
There are loads of free or inexpensive social sharing plugins available for WordPress users.
Most social sharing plugins allow you to select which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections 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 help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, many themes also provide built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for better traffic results)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons to your website is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features)
Other Configuration Features For WordPress Traffic
Last but not least in the traffic configuration process, are the components 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 visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you engage in any form of business online, it’s important that your site stays compliant with government legal requirements.
(Does Your Site Comply With The Law?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, go here:
WordPress Post Categories And Tags
Categories & tags help improve traffic by improving your site’s search engine optimization.
(WordPress post categories help to improve your site’s SEO, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and categories should be set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
When considering ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal results.
Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites discover your web content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. Although search engines like Google will index your pages 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 can result in increased traffic.
Your 404 Page
When online users type in the wrong URL into their web browser or click on a hyperlink pointing to a page on your website that no longer exists, they will normally be presented with an error page …
(A 404 Error Page)
A 404 Error Page can be configured to funnel visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your server, there are plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your website has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you then need to do is post fresh content on a consistent basis to attract traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of different components and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of skills and knowledge required to perform the configuration stage of the traffic automation process typically takes some web developers months to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is addressed in the next section of the WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read more, click on the link below:
This article is part of an article series designed to help business owners learn how to grow their business using a WordPress-powered website and proven marketing methods that are easy and quick to implement.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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