Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive traffic automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically attract new traffic is publish new content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we looked at 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 everything 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 where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In this article, we will look at the configuration stage of this process. We explain how to configure a WordPress site so you can automatically drive traffic simply by posting new content on your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration
The ability 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 worldwide and businesses are researching every advantage available to get better results online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge advantage over other competitors. Having an expertly configured WordPress site gives your business a flying start and a significant advantage online.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
There is a 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 you.
Here’s a simple way to understand the difference:
With a WordPress site 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 does a whole lot more labor go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special kind of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with a story.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
All was going well in the widget assembly line when everything ground to a sudden halt.
As no one could figure out what went wrong, the manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert went immediately to the main control box. After staring silently at the box for about 2 minutes or so, the expert then produced a little hammer from his tool box and made a very gentle tap near the right edge of the box.
Immediately, everything started working once more.
The plant manager was 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 request of payment for services totalling $5,000.
The manager picked up the phone and dialed the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged such a ludicrous fee for less than five minutes work and promptly 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 number one challenge most businesses face online is driving traffic to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when production stopped working and no one on the business was able to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to demand fair compensation for having spent years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to assess and avert a very serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a website set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social followers from Facebook and Twitter 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 attracting new visitors to your site?)
While the solution to many challenges may seem ridiculously easy once implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy when you try to work things out.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring settings for the client. It also involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed to get specific functionalities on your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts you need to set up and activate to achieve specific outcomes
- Which settings you need to configure in order to ensure that things work to plan, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite involved and time-consuming. This is because it’s not as easy as installing and configuring one or two plugins, clicking on a button or two … it’s all this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of different components including your web server, your website, and a number of third-party sites and services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at these areas in more detail.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about fine-tuning settings in your server that affect how your website will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic your business may attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for 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 forwarding, setting up error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirections, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of third-party sites and services.
External Sites
The basic concept of choosing external sites is that all of your content should be posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, get distributed automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external platforms have been added to your system, content with links pointing back to your site will get automatically published on these platforms. Your content will then be given exposure to a new audience and new sources of traffic.
Some sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site’s settings 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 Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Search Console lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with a range of essential information, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account with Google Search Console are set up, you can 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, user engagement, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site details have been set up, you can add your account information to all of your web pages in WordPress via plugins and feed data automatically to many other online applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account and site data have been set up, your information can be used with web traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress provides users with a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your web traffic generation system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media Pages
(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 and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have set up accounts and profiles with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose the ones that will work well with your system and/or content syndication tools.
(There are loads of social sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add an RSS feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your social feed.
There are many different platforms you can incorporate into your own traffic system. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with third-party sites, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Web Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings section that allows you to configure 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 results, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains a powerful and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the list of services entered into the Update Services field
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section displays only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of all the update services you want to notify as soon as you publish a new post to this section and WordPress takes care of 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 Settings
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 traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could play a part in someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website to view the rest of the content from summaries, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Generally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to ping various update services when a new post gets 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 unchecked …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings)
Discussion
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 sites linked to from your posts, 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 Section)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings enable WordPress to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the options for configuring your SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
To learn more about setting up WP permalinks, refer to this step-by-step tutorial: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks
Configuring Settings – Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add just about every kind of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Let’s look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that affect traffic generation
Blog Defender WordPress 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 matter what kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, securing your site is something you cannot ignore.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to hackers and botnets.
Go here for more information:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website …
(SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive more traffic by making your site more search engine friendly)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your website’s search engine optimization. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google to index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with others can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you post content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social plugins allow you to choose which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your pages which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress – Traffic Features In 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 layout and design aspects of your website, many themes also provide built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) can be configured for improved traffic results)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your website is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure
Last but not least in the configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with good and bad traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you are making money online, you need to make sure that your site is found to comply with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
For a detailed article about the importance of having a compliant website, see this article:
WordPress Tags And Categories
Post categories and tags help to improve your site’s search optimization, which helps to increase traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your website.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s categories and tags should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phases.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post categories and tags that have been set up.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
A site map that displays all of your posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites find more of your web content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but 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 using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Don’t Forget Your Site’s 404 Page
When online visitors type in the wrong web address or click on a hyperlink pointing to a destination on your site that no longer exists, they will typically be greeted with a 404 error page …
(A WordPress 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your web server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do to automatically begin attracting traffic is add great content consistently.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of different components and external web properties …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise required to perform this process typically takes some website professionals a long time to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as you can. This step is explained in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 3
To keep reading this article, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive tutorial series aimed at helping site owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively with a WordPress-driven website and proven web marketing methods.
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