Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your website into an automated traffic generating machine using WordPress.
In Part 1 of this article series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is add web content on a regular basis to automatically attract new web traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this article, we will look at the configuration stage of this process. We will show you what makes an expertly configured site different. You will also discover how much work is required to make sure that when everything is set up and configured, you can automatically drive visitors simply by publishing content regularly on your website.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Businesses are becoming increasingly more competitive on a global scale and are researching every advantage available to get better results online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous advantage over other competitors. An expertly configured WordPress site gives your business a significant competitive advantage from the very start.
The Configuration Process Is What Makes All The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here is a simple way to understand the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does it take extra work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special kind of expert knowledge.
Allow me to illustrate this with an amusing anecdote.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
Things are moving along in the gizmo assembly line when everything comes to a sudden stop.
No one can figure out what’s gone wrong and so the plant manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrives and, without uttering a word, heads immediately towards the control box. After staring silently at the wiring board for no more than 3 minutes, the expert then produces a teensy-weensy hammer from his shirt pocket and makes a single tap about one and half inches from the right edge of the control unit.
Immediately, every machine in the assembly plant begins to work once again.
The manager is filled with joy as he thanks the expert, who leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the manager receives an invoice for the amount of $5,000.
Bewildered and angry, the manager picks up the phone and dials the expert. Why were they expected to pay so much for less than five minutes work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives 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 web traffic to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when the machines ground to a halt and no one in the business had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to get paid fairly for having spent years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to immediately avert a serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your site configured so all you had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other web 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?)
Although the solution to many problems often seems ridiculously easy once it’s been implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than installing a website and configuring some basic settings. It involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install to add specific functionalities to your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts need to be set up to get certain results
- Which options need to be configured in order to ensure that things will work how you have planned, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this part of the traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite involved and complicated. 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 of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many parts such as your web hosting server, your site, and various external sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we were to create a simple flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing all the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these areas.
Configuring The Web Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about tweaking settings and options in your web server specifically for handling web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your webhosting account settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic you can attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like implementing spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning 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 concept behind choosing external sites is that all of your content should be posted to a central location (your site) and from there, get automatically distributed to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you add these external platforms to your setup, content pointing back to your website will get automatically syndicated to these platforms, indexed by search engines and distributed to social sites, even to users of the platform itself. Your website will be exposed to a new audience and new sources of traffic.
Some of these external sites will need to be set up before configuring your site to help save time 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)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with important information, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your account, you can use this information to integrate and automate traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data have been set up, you can add your account information to all of your web pages in WordPress using a Google Analytics plugin and send data instantly to many other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account with Bing, use this information with web traffic-related settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress provides users with the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to grow a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your traffic generation system in Part Four of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media accounts and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need your social media and social bookmarking accounts set up before you can integrate these with 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 bring new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts and pages set up with all the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are many social sites you can set up. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose those that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(You can post your content to lots of social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online technology platforms and content aggregators that can act as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
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 own RebelMouse account.
There are various sites and platforms you can incorporate into your traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
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 key areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
By default, your WordPress administration area includes a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and often overlooked traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – 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 or your webmaster have intentionally configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of update services entered into the Update Services text box
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section lists only one entry …
(Writing Settings – WordPress Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(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 readers 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 content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to get the rest of the content from summaries, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as your traffic system is concerned, however, the main setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to instantly notify various update services when new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, make sure this box is left unchecked …
(WordPress 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks Section)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring post permalinks)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that can 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 examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to bring more visitors to your site
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is completely immune from cyber attacks.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
Go here for more details:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web content more indexable …
(WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index, it allows you to specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with WordPress plugins.
Most social plugins let you choose which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
WordPress – Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, many themes also provide built-in options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) include built-in traffic optimization features)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your site is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons to configure your options and enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic – Additional Configuration
Last (but by no means least) in the configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you do business online (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your website is compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Comply With The Law?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, see this article:
Post Tags And Post Categories
WordPress categories and tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your web pages.
(Categories help to improve your site’s search optimization, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and post categories should be discussed and set up during the Website Planning Phase.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and post categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal benefits.
Add A 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 applications discover more of your site’s content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although search engines like Google can index your site just using 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 – Another Source Of Traffic!
When visitors searching for your site enter the wrong web address or click on a link pointing to a destination on your website that no longer exists, they are presented with a 404 Not Found error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up in your web server, there are several WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your website or blog fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do to automatically drive web traffic is add content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of various components and web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration stage of the traffic automation process typically takes some 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 addressed in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part Three
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 online cost-effectively using a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven online marketing methods.
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