Welcome to Part Three of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your website into an automated traffic generating machine using WordPress.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is add fresh content consistently to automatically start generating more traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase of the blueprint. We helped you understand 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 site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In this section, we will look at the configuration phase of the WordPress traffic automation system. We will show you how to configure a WordPress site to ensure that new traffic will automatically start flowing just by publishing fresh content on your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With business becoming ever more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth learning about any and every advantage that can help you improve your own results online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge advantage over the competition. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website allows their business to get off to a flying start from the moment their site is launched.
The Difference Is In The Configuration Process
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to understand the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with a built-in 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’s illustrate this with an anecdote.
Knowing Where To Tap
All was working according to schedule in the gizmo factory when everything came to a sudden stop.
As no one could figure out what happened, the plant manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert walked directly to the main control box. After staring silently at the electronic components for less than 3 minutes or so, the expert then took out a teeny-weeny hammer and made a very gentle tap near the right-hand edge of the control unit.
Immediately, everything returned to normal.
The plant manager was greatly relieved as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the manager received a bill for $5,000.
The manager dialed the expert, demanding to know why he had charged them such a ludicrous fee for so little time spent delivering such minimal amount of work and promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrived and was placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is driving new visitors to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the factory floor had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert not have the right to be compensated fairly for spending years developing the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to repair a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your website set up and configured so all you have to do is publish content to it and search engines, social sites like Facebook and LinkedIn and dozens of other 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 driving traffic to your website?)
Although many experts often make complex solutions look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring some of the site settings for clients. It also involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs need to be installed for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up to get certain results
- Which settings you need to configure to make sure everything will work how you expect, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This part of the traffic automation system is not so technically difficult, but it’s quite involved and complicated. It’s not just about installing a piece of software, clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a process that involves your server, your site, and various third-party sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about tweaking settings in your web server that affect how your website will handle all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web-hosting account settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic your site may attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include things like implementing spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirections, etc?)
Once your server settings have been checked and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of external sites.
Integration With External Web Properties
The basic idea of setting up external sites is that all content gets published from a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it gets distributed automatically to other components of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After adding these external services to your network, content pointing back to your site will be automatically syndicated to these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social networks, even to visitors attracted to the platform itself. Your content and website will benefit from exposure online, helping you tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of these sites will need to be set up before configuring your settings to help speed up the configuration 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 before configuring your settings:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Webmasters 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 data, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site data, the account details can be used with traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s results, SEO, marketing efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
After setting up your account and site details, visitor tracking information can be easily integrated with WordPress via a simple Google Analytics plugin and instantly sent to many other useful 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 account, this information can be used to automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers website owners a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. 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 Part Four of this article series.
Social Media Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your 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 sites and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have set up accounts and profile pages with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can You can syndicate your content to loads of social sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just select the ones that will work with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(You can syndicate your content to lots of social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your RebelMouse website.
There are various solutions that can be added to your web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website Or Blog
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
WordPress Settings
By default, all WordPress installations include a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains a powerful and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As described below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services box
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section displays only one entry …
(Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically …
(WordPress lets you 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 Settings
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 traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could play a part in someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to view 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 your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Typically, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to ping your list of update services whenever a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, make sure this box is left unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Section)
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 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks Screen)
Here are some of the ways SEO-friendly URLs can be configured …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
To learn more about setting up permalinks in WordPress, refer to this tutorial: How To Change Your WordPress Permalinks
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings For Traffic Generation
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with the effects of 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 website security.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to bots and hackers.
For more details, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your site more search engine friendly …
(WordPress SEO Plugin – Yoast SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google to index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with their social networks can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social features to your website with WordPress plugins)
You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using WordPress plugins.
Most social plugins let you specify 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 shares), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Configuring WordPress Traffic Generation Theme Features
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 the design and layout 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 like Graphene (a free theme) have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your pages is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Additional Configuration Aspects For WordPress
Last (but by no means least) in the configuration process, are the things that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you make money online (or plan to), it’s important that your site is found to comply with government legal requirements.
(Does Your Site Comply With The Law?)
We have written a detailed article about how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your website or blog here:
WordPress Post Categories And Tags
WordPress categories & tags help search engines index your pages, which improves traffic.
(WordPress categories help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your website’s categories and tags should be set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the categories and tags that have been set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A visitor site map that displays all of your site’s pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites find your online content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, while an XML sitemap is mostly filled with code that only search bots can understand. Although Google will index your site just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Don’t Forget Your 404 Page
When visitors type in the wrong web address or click on an invalid hyperlink, they will typically be presented with a 404 Not Found page …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
A 404 Not Found page can redirect confused visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error page can be set up in your web server, there are several WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your website or blog expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then is add great content on a consistent basis to automatically start attracting traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different components and external web properties …
(WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration phase of the traffic automation process can take some website professionals a long time to acquire.
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 series.
This is the end of Section 3
To keep reading this article, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business and drive traffic sustainably using a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven online marketing strategies.
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