Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your site using WordPress.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is post new content regularly to automatically begin attracting more web traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase of this process. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will look at the configuration phase of this process. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site so you can start driving web traffic automatically when you begin to publish web content to your website.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as one of their greatest challenges online. Also, the business landscape is becoming so much more competitive and businesses are researching any and every advantage they believe will help them get better results online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand is a tremendous competitive advantage. For businesses, an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start as soon as their website is launched.
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 developer but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here’s a simple way to understand the main difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does it take extra labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special type of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with a little story.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
Things are humming along in the widget workshop when everything comes to a sudden stop.
No one can figure out what’s gone wrong and so the floor manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrives and, without saying a word, walks immediately towards the control box. After staring silently at the wiring board for what seems like 2 minutes, the expert then produces a tiny little hammer and makes a very gentle tap near the right edge of the unit.
Immediately, the assembly line starts working again.
The plant manager is grateful and relieved as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives an invoice for the sum of $5,000.
Furious, the factory manager picks up the phone and rings the expert. Demanding to know why they have been charged so much for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving web traffic to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when the machines stopped working and no one in the business had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to demand fair compensation for having spent years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to immediately assess and avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WP website or blog set up so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social networks and dozens of other online properties would be instantly 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?)
Although many experts often make complex things look easy, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than installing a website and configuring a few basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which third-party accounts you need to set up to get specific outcomes
- Which options you need to configure in order to make sure things function the way you want, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite involved. This is because it’s not just about installing and configuring a solution, clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a complex process that involves your web hosting server, your website or blog, and various third-party sites or online services …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart of all the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a better look at what’s involved.
Your Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for website installation purposes. What we are talking about, is tweaking settings and options in your web server that affect how your website will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your web-hosting account settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic your business may attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for both good and unwelcome traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like implementing spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
After your server settings have been checked and configured (if required), the next step is to set up and configure various external sites.
External Sites
The basic concept of choosing external sites is that all of your content will be published from one central location (your site) and from there, it will get automatically distributed to other components of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After incorporating these external services into your setup, content linked back to your site gets automatically added to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and business will be given added exposure to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some third-party sites and services 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, you will want to set up the following accounts:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Webmasters lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of useful data, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your account and entering site data with Google, use this information to integrate and automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s results, SEO, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data are set up, you can add visitor tracking information to WordPress via a plugin and send data instantly to many other online applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account and entering site data with Bing Webmaster Tools, you can 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 Two, WordPress offers website owners the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to build a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your traffic generation system in Part Four of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need your social media and social bookmarking 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 pages and bring new visitors to your site.
Set up profiles with all of the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose the ones that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(There are many social sites you can syndicate your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging web platforms and RSS 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 that lets you add a feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your account.
There are various technologies and third-party applications that can be added to your own web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up third-party service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
WordPress Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring WordPress Settings
The WordPress administration area contains a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Section)
As stated 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 purposely configured your site settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services section
By default, this section contains only one entry …
(Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section and WordPress will do the rest …
(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
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 web traffic. For example, your choice to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to read 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 in this section as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Typically, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to automatically notify various update services whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Section)
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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks Section)
The examples below show some of the ways SEO-friendly URLs can be configured …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
If you need help setting up WordPress permalinks, go here: Changing Your WordPress Permalinks
WordPress – Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Let’s take a brief look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No website or blog is completely safe from being attacked by hackers.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to botnets and hackers.
Go here for more details:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web pages easily indexable …
(WordPress Plugin – Yoast SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO can significantly improve your SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google to 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 easily share your content online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can add social sharing to your site easily using WordPress plugins.
Many social sharing plugins allow you to specify which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your pages 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 grow your traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, many themes also provide built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes like Graphene (a free theme) include built-in traffic optimization features)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons to your content is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Other Important Sections To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the WordPress traffic configuration process, are the components that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to your business when 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 site is found to comply with all government regulations.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Compliant?)
To learn more about how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website or blog, go here:
WordPress Post Tags And Categories
Post categories & tags help to improve your site’s search optimization, which improves traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your website.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s tags and categories during the Website Planning Phases.
When configuring your web site 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 benefits and results.
Add A Site Map
A visitor site map that lists all of your posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites discover more of your site’s 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 two different things. HTML site maps are web pages that link to all other content on your site and provide visitors with a an understandable representation of how your content is structured, whereas XML sitemaps are mostly just a bunch of code that only search engines can read. Although search engines like Google can index your pages 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 results in increased traffic.
404 Page – Don’t Lose Traffic!
When visitors searching for your site enter the wrong web address or click on links pointing to pages on your site that no longer exist, they will typically be greeted with an error – page not found message …
(A 404 Error Page)
A 404 Error Page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up on your web server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your site has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do then to automatically begin attracting web traffic is add fresh content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different components and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The skills and knowledge involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many website developers months to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of articles designed to help you learn how to grow your business and drive traffic automatically with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven web marketing methods.
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