Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this article series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is post fresh content on a regular basis to automatically start generating traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we look at the configuration phase of the traffic automation process. We will show you how a WordPress site should be configured to automatically drive visitors simply by consistently posting new content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as their greatest challenge online. With competition becoming increasingly more difficult businesses are looking for every advantage they believe will help them improve their results and performance online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a huge advantage over other competitors. Having an expertly configured WordPress site gives you a flying start from the moment your site is launched.
The Difference Is In The Configuration Process
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to explain the differences:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a web presence with an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence and 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 expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with a story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All was going well in the gizmo assembly line when suddenly, production came to a complete stop.
No one could figure out what went wrong and so the plant manager decided to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert headed immediately towards the main control box. After staring at the control unit for no more than 3 minutes or so, the expert then produced a tiny hammer and made a gentle tap about one inch from the left-hand edge of the control unit.
Immediately, the machinery sprang to life.
The floor manager was delighted as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager received a request for payment of services rendered for the sum of $5,000.
The factory manager called the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged such a ludicrous fee for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice arrived in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive web traffic to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one in the factory floor had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for investing years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and fix a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a web site fully configured so all you have to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other web properties would be automatically 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 many experts often make complicated solutions look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to work things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring some basic settings. It involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins you need to install for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which third-party services you need to set up to achieve certain results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured in order to make sure things will function as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this part of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically challenging, it can be quite complicated. It’s not as simple as installing and configuring a piece of software, configuring some settings in your admin area … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration phase is a process that involves your web server, your site, and various external sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic diagram of the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these areas in more detail.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking 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 in your server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic your business will attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for good and unwanted traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like configuring spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess and error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these, the next step is to configure various third-party sites and services.
3rd-Party Services
The idea behind choosing external sites is that all content will get published to a central location (your site) and from there, it will be automatically distributed to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external services have been added to your setup, content with links pointing back to your site is automatically added to these platforms. Your website receives additional exposure online, helping your business tap into a whole new audience and source of traffic.
Some third-party sites and services will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress site to help save time 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:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Webmaster Tools 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 reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site details with Google Webmasters, this information can be used to automate web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site details have been set up, you can add visitor tracking code to all of your web pages in WordPress via a simple Google Analytics plugin and send data automatically to other applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. After setting up your account and entering site details with Bing Webmaster Tools, use the information to automate web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers users the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to grow a professional web presence.
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 explain how to integrate this into your web traffic generation system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site)
You will need your various social media and social bookmarking accounts set up before you can configure these as part of 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 get new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts and profiles with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work with your system and/or content syndication tools.
(You can post your content to many social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of emerging technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute social content to social networks)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your RebelMouse social feed.
There are various platforms that can be incorporated into your own traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up accounts with third-party services, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global Settings
Your WordPress admin area contains a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most powerful and frequently overlooked traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings)
As stated below 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 services entered into the Update Services box
By default, only one service is available …
(Writing Settings – Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress – 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 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 visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can have an influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content 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 to get 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 in this section as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Normally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to instantly notify all the update services you have listed whenever new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
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 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow your site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s permalink URLs …
(Configuring permalinks)
If you need help setting up permalinks, refer to this tutorial: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality to your site, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is completely safe from being targeted.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and bots.
Go here to learn more:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your site more search engine friendly …
(SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your website more search engine friendly)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google to index, it also gives you control over how your content is presented to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with members of their own online communities can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using WordPress plugins)
There are loads of free or inexpensive social sharing plugins available for WordPress users.
Most social sharing plugins allow you to specify which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress Traffic Theme Features – Configuration
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 the design and layout of your site, many themes also include options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for faster indexing, add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons to your content is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic Automation – Additional Configuration
Last (but by no means least) in the WordPress traffic system configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and unwanted 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 ensure that your site is compliant with government regulations.
(Is Your Site Compliant?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, see this article:
Post Categories And Tags
WordPress categories and tags help to improve your site’s SEO, which helps you get more traffic.
(Categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search engine optimization.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s tags and categories should be set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phases.
When looking at ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and post categories you have set up.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools discover more of your website content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. 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), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – Another Source Of Traffic!
When visitors searching online for your site enter the wrong web address into their browser or click on a hyperlink pointing to an incorrect destination on your website, they are presented with a 404 Not Found page …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
A 404 page can be turned into a useful source of traffic to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your web server, there are plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then is add great content consistently to generate more web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different components and external web properties …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise required to perform this process typically takes some web developers months to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is covered in the next article in the 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 articles designed to help you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively and drive traffic sustainably with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven marketing methods that are easy and quick to implement.
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