Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this article series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to attract new web traffic is post content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we will look at the configuration stage of the traffic system. We will show you how a WordPress site should be configured in order to automatically get web traffic whenever you add fresh content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. With business getting increasingly more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth exploring any and every advantage that can help you get better results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous advantage over other competitors. For WordPress users, an expertly configured website means having a significant advantage from the very beginning.
Configuration Is The Difference
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 developer but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to understand the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does it take additional work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
Everything is running smoothly in the widget workshop when all of a sudden, things comes to a halt.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
The expert arrives shortly after being summoned and, without uttering a word, goes immediately to the control box. After staring at the box for less than 3 minutes, the expert then takes out a teeny-weeny hammer from his pocket and makes a gentle tap near the left-hand edge of the unit.
Immediately, everything springs back to life.
The plant manager is greatly relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a request for payment of services rendered for $5,000.
Bewildered and angry, the factory manager dials the expert. Why have they had been charged so much for less than 5 minutes work? He then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives and is placed in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic to their sites.
How much money did the widget factory stand to lose when the machines ground to a halt and no one on the factory floor had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to get paid fairly for years spent building up the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and avert a serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your site set up and configured so all you had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social networking sites and dozens of other online properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
Although the solution to many problems is often ridiculously simple in hindsight, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than just installing a website and configuring some basic settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed to add specific functionalities to your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up to get specific outcomes
- Which options you need to configure in order to ensure that everything will work as planned, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the traffic automation system may not seem so technically difficult, it can be quite involved and time-consuming. This is because it’s not as simple as installing a piece of software, tweaking some options and settings in your dashboard area or clicking on a button or two … it’s all this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many components such as your web server, your website, and a number of external sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing all the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
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). We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your web-hosting account that affect how your site will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your web hosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your business can attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for good and unwanted traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like implementing server-level spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these, the next step is to set up and configure a number of third-party sites.
External Sites
The purpose of choosing external sites is that all content should be published from a central location (your site) and from there, be automatically distributed to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After incorporating these external sites into your system, content with links pointing back to your website gets automatically added to search, social and aggregator sites. Your content and site benefits from exposure online, helping your business tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of these third-party sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your settings to 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 before configuring your site:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Webmasters lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of useful data, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your account and entering site data, you can use the account information to integrate and automate web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
After setting up your up your account and entered your site details, traffic tracking data can be easily integrated with WordPress using a simple plugin and and sent to other useful applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account and site data have been set up, you can use the information to integrate and automate web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress offers website owners a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to grow 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 these features into your traffic system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need to have already set up your social media accounts before you can 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 sites and bring new visitors to your site.
You should have pages set up with all the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick 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).
(There are many social sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online technology platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different users.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add an RSS feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your RebelMouse social feed.
There are many different platforms that can be incorporated into your own web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore this area further and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
WordPress Settings
By default, all WordPress installations include 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 …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains an important and often overlooked traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings)
As described below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have purposely configured your site settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services field
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section lists only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list containing all of the update services you want notified to this section …
(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
***
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 on this page can influence traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to read the rest of the content from a partial feed, 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 here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to notify your list of update services when new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
Discussion
Although discussion settings 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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow your site to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s permalink URLs …
(Configuring permalinks)
For a detailed tutorial about setting up WordPress permalinks, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add just about every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help drive more traffic to your site
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No blog is safe from being attacked by hackers.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to botnet and hacker attacks.
More info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web content easy for search engines to index …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress Plugins For SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO can significantly improve your SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google to find and index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with others can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if your site provides content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social features to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
You can easily add social sharing to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social share plugins allow you to select which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which users can unlock by sharing your page.
WordPress – Traffic Generation Theme Features
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring layout and design aspects of your site, some themes also provide built-in features that let you improve SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes can be configured for better traffic results)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing features to your website is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Other Configuration Areas For Your WordPress Site
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic 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 how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you are making money online, it’s important that your site remains compliant with government regulations.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Compliant?)
To learn more about the importance of having a legally compliant website, go here:
Post Categories & Tags
Post categories and post tags help to improve your site’s search optimization, which helps to increase traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better classify and index your website.)
As we recommend in this article, your website’s post tags and categories should be set up 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.
Visitor Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools find 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 two different things. Only search engine bots can read an XML sitemap. Although search engines like Google can index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Page – Don’t Forget This!
When visitors searching online for your site enter the wrong URL into their web browser or click on hyperlinks pointing to an incorrect destination on your website, they will normally be presented with a 404 error page …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up in your web server, there are several WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then is post great content consistently to start driving traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some web professionals a long time 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 covered in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read more, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive tutorial series designed to help you learn how to grow your business online with a WordPress-powered website and proven web marketing strategies.
Want To Get Automatically Notified When New Tutorials Are Published? Then Subscribe To WPCompendium.org!
***
"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
***