Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic generating machine using WordPress.
In Part One of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is publish great content consistently to drive more web traffic!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase of the automation process. We helped you understand the best way to get started 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 site was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In this section, we look at the configuration stage of this process. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site to attract web traffic automatically as you start posting web content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration Phase
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by website owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With business becoming increasingly more competitive worldwide, it’s worth learning about every opportunity you can to improve your own results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous advantage. Having an expertly configured website gives you a flying start and an immediate advantage online.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to describe the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does it take extra work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
A Semi-True Story …
Everything is going just fine in the widget-making factory when the machines suddenly stops.
No one can figure out what’s wrong and so the floor manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert walks directly towards the control box. After staring at the wiring diagrams for no more than 5 minutes or so, the expert then produces a tiny hammer and makes a very gentle tap near the left-hand corner of the box.
Immediately, every machine begins working once again.
The plant manager is greatly relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the manager receives an invoice for $5,000.
With great anger, the manager calls the expert. Why had they had been charged such a ludicrous fee for so little time spent delivering such minimal amount of work? He then requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive visitors consistently to their sites.
How much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the factory floor had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have the right to get paid fairly for investing years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly assess and avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress website or blog set up so all you had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other online properties would be instantly 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?)
While many experts often make complicated situations and problems look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to figure things out.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than installing a website and configuring a few internal settings. It involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs need to be installed to add certain functionalities to your site.
- Which 3rd-party services you need to set up and activate to get desired results
- Which options you need to configure in order to make sure everything will function as expected, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically difficult, but it’s quite involved and time-consuming. It’s not as simple as installing a solution, configuring some settings in your admin area or clicking a button … it’s all this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many different components such as your web server, your site, and various third-party sites or online services …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we create a simplified flowchart showing the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these areas.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for site installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your webhosting account that affect how your site will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic you will attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like server-level spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been checked and configured, the next step is to set up and configure various external sites.
Configuring External Sites
The basic idea of setting up external sites is that all of your content gets posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it then gets distributed automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external services have been added to your network, content with links pointing back to your website will be automatically published on these platforms, indexed by search engines and distributed to social sites, even to users of the platform itself. Your content will be exposed to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some third-party sites will need to have accounts 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 site)
Google Search Console lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with important information, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account has been set up, this information can be used with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
After setting up your account, tracking code can be added to WordPress using plugins used with other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. After setting up your account with Bing, you can use this information to automate web traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress offers the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you are planning to grow a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your automated traffic generation system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media accounts and bring new traffic to your site)
You will need to set up your social media and social bookmarking accounts 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 attract new visitors to your site.
You should have profiles set up with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose those that will work with your system and/or content syndication tools (we cover some of these tools in greater detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to loads of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online technology platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add a feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your page.
There are various sites and platforms you can add to your own traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Web Site
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
Configuring WordPress Settings
Your WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains a powerful and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Screen)
As stated below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically configured your site settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services text area
By default, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
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 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 on this page can influence traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS feeds 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 site 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 traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is ticked or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to automatically notify all the update services you have listed in the Update Services section when new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Global Settings – 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 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
Your Permalink settings enable your site to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the options for configuring your permalink URLs …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
We have created a detailed tutorial on using permalinks in WordPress here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that can add just about every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is guaranteed immunity from being targeted.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to botnet and hacker attacks.
For more details, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving improving the way search engines like Google find, crawl and index your web pages …
(SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive traffic by making your site more search engine friendly)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index, it allows you to configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you post content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
There are loads of free or inexpensive social sharing plugins available for WordPress.
Most social plugins allow you to select which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your site which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings For Traffic Generation
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 design and layout elements of your site, many themes also give you built-in features that let you improve SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your site is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure For Improved Traffic Flow
Last but not least in the web traffic system configuration process, are the components that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both 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, you need to make sure that your website complies with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?)
If you need help understanding how to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your website, go here:
WordPress Post Categories And Tags
Categories and post tags help search engines better organize and index your pages, which helps you get more traffic.
(Post categories help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to discuss and set up your website’s tags and categories earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and post categories you have set up.
Add A Site Map
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications find more of your web content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. Although search engines like Google will index your site just using 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.
404 Page Not Found – An Additional Source Of Traffic!
When online visitors type in the wrong URL into their web browser or click on links pointing to pages on your website that no longer exist, they are greeted with an error page …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
A 404 page can be configured to funnel visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up on your server, there are plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your site fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then is post new content regularly to attract traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise required to perform the configuration phase of the traffic automation process can take some website professionals months to acquire.
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 addressed in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Part 3
To continue reading, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive article series aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively using a WordPress-powered website and proven web marketing methods.
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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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