Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your website into an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is post web content regularly to automatically bring more traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed critical setup decisions. We explained 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 site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we look at the configuration phase of the traffic blueprint. You will understand what makes an expertly configured WordPress site different than a professionally configured one. You will also understand how much work needs to be done to make sure that when everything is set up and fully configured, visitors will automatically start flowing as you begin to add web content on your web site.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With competition making business survival increasingly more difficult businesses are looking for every advantage available to increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous advantage over other competitors. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website means having a significant advantage from the word “go”.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
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 site gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special kind of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this here is an amusing anecdote.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All was going just fine in the widget-making assembly line when everything suddenly came to a halt.
As no one could figure out what happened, the manager decided to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert walked immediately to the control box. After staring at the board for less than 3 minutes or so, the expert then took out a tiny little hammer from his shirt pocket and made a very gentle tap about one inch from the bottom-left corner of the box.
Immediately, everything came back to life.
The manager was greatly relieved as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager received an invoice for the sum of $5,000.
The manager dialed the expert, demanding to know why they were charged so much for less than 5 minutes work. He then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrived in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new visitors consistently to their sites.
How much money did the factory stand to lose when the machines ground to a halt and no one on the business had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to get paid fairly for having spent years developing the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to quickly assess and fix a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a site set up and configured so all you have to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other web properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
Although the solution to many problems often seems quite simple in hindsight, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than installing a website and configuring settings for a client. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which programs need to be installed to add various functionalities to your site.
- Which 3rd-party services you need to set up and activate to get certain results
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure to make sure everything works as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This part of the traffic automation system is not so technically difficult, but it’s quite involved and complicated. The reason why is because it’s not as simple as installing a piece of software, configuring some options and settings in your dashboard area … it’s all this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of various different parts such as your web server, your site, and various external sites and services …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified diagram of the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these steps.
Your Web Server
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). What we are talking about, is configuring settings in your web server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your site may attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for good and unwelcome traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step is to configure various external sites and/or online services.
External Services
The basic idea of choosing external sites is that all content is published to a central location (your site) and from there, it radiates outwards automatically to other components of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external sites have been added to your setup, content with links pointing back to your site is automatically published on these platforms. Your site will be exposed to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some of these third-party sites and services will need to be set up before configuring your settings to help 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 Webmasters)
Google Webmasters lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of useful data, SEO tools, and reports about their website.
Once your account and site details have been set up, your information can be used to automate traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site details have been set up, you can add traffic monitoring code to all of your web pages in WordPress using any of several Google Analytics plugins and feed data automatically to many other useful applications and web properties.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. After setting up your account and entering site data with Bing, this information can be used with traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress offers website owners the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to build a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, 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 automated traffic generation system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your various social media 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 drive new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have accounts and pages set up with all the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(You can post your content to lots of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of emerging technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add an RSS feed from your WordPress blog …
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 social feed.
There are various sites and platforms you can incorporate into your web traffic system. Please 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 web server and set up accounts with third-party services, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Web Site
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 of the important points.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
Your WordPress administration area contains a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and often overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Screen)
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 – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the list of update services entered into the Update Services field
By default, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section …
(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 traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s decision 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 in this section as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to ping all the update services you have specified in the Update Services box when new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings)
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 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)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow your site to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks)
Here are some of the options for configuring your permalinks …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
We have created a detailed tutorial about using WordPress permalinks here: Setting Up WordPress Permalinks
WordPress – Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add almost every kind of functionality to your site, including 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 WordPress site for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No website or blog is safe from a cyber attack.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to hackers and bots.
Go here for more details:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages easy for search engines like Google to index …
(WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to find, classify and index, it allows you to configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
You can add social features to your website easily with WordPress plugins.
Most social share 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 shares), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring Settings – Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring design and layout aspects of your website, many themes also provide built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your content is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic System – Other Important Aspects To Consider
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and bad traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you make money online (or plan to), you need to make sure that your site stays compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
If you need help understanding the importance of having a legally compliant website, go here:
Post Categories And Tags
Post tags & post categories help to improve your site’s search optimization, which helps you get more traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better classify and index your pages.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and post categories should be set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s categories and tags have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits and results.
HTML Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites discover your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although search engines like Google will index your pages 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 can result in increased traffic.
404 Page – Don’t Lose Traffic!
When visitors searching online for your site type in the wrong URL into their web browser or click on a dead link, they are greeted with an error – page not found message …
(A 404 Error Page)
A 404 Error Page can be configured to funnel traffic to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up in your web server, there are plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your website or blog has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do to automatically begin bringing more web traffic is publish new content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of various components and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many web developers a long time to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is covered in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read more, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help small business owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively with a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven marketing methods that are easy to implement.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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