Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to attract new traffic is add content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of the automation process. We explained the best way to start 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 website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we will discuss the configuration phase of the traffic automation process. You will learn what makes an expertly configured WordPress site different than a professionally configured site. You will also discover how much work is required to make sure that when everything is set up and configured, web traffic will automatically start flowing just by regularly publishing new content to your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business getting increasingly more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth exploring every opportunity you can to get better results online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can be a huge advantage over other competitors. With an expertly configured WordPress site, your business has a flying start from the moment your website is launched.
The Difference Is In The Configuration Process
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and 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 professional web presence with an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only is extra labor required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
Let me illustrate this with a little story.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
Everything is running smoothly in the gizmo factory when the machines suddenly comes to a halt.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the plant manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
The expert arrives shortly afterward and, without saying a word, heads directly towards the control box. After staring silently at the board for about 5 minutes, the expert then produces a tiny little hammer from his shirt pocket and makes a very gentle tap about three cm from the top-left corner of the box.
Immediately, the whole machine springs back to life.
The plant manager is grateful and relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the manager receives an invoice for $5,000.
Confused and bewildered, the factory manager calls the expert. Why had he charged them such a ludicrous fee for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is driving new traffic to their sites.
How much money did the plant stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one in 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 developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a site fully set up and configured so all you had to do is publish new content and search engines, social media and dozens of other web properties would be instantly notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
While the solution to many challenges can seem ridiculously easy once it’s been implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring site settings for clients. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which third-party accounts you need to set up to achieve desired outcomes
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure in order to make sure things will function to plan, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not so technically difficult, but it’s quite involved and complicated. This is because it’s not just about installing one or two plugins, tweaking some settings in your admin area … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration phase involves the integration of various different parts such as your web server, your website, and various external sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these areas.
Configuring Your Web Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for site installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings in your server specifically for handling web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic you can attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include things like implementing server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of external sites.
Configuring External Services
The idea behind adding external sites is that all of your content gets published to a central location (your site) and from there, it syndicates automatically to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you incorporate these external sites into your traffic network, content linking back to your website will be automatically published on these platforms. Your content and website will be given added exposure to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of the third-party sites will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site 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:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with important data, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your account and site data with Google are set up, use the account information with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account has been set up, you can add traffic tracking information to all of your pages in WordPress using a Google Analytics plugin and feed data automatically to various other online applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. After setting up your Bing Webmaster Tools account and entering site details, use the account information to automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers both a self-hosted (WordPress.org) and a hosted (WordPress.com) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to build a professional web presence.
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 these features into your automated traffic generation system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your various social media and social bookmarking accounts 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 sites and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site.
You should have profiles set up with all the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content syndication tools (we cover some of these tools in greater detail in the Automation phase).
(There are many social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online web platforms and content aggregators that can serve as second-tier 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 – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your page.
There are many different sites and platforms that can be incorporated into your traffic system. Please contact us if you would like to explore some of these and discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up accounts with third-party services, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
WordPress Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress Settings
Your WordPress administration area contains a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and often overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As stated in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have intentionally configured your settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services text area
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is available …
(Writing Settings – WordPress Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(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 visitors will see your content 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 content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to view the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as traffic is concerned, however, the main setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to notify the list of update services when a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings)
Discussion Settings
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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks enable your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings Screen)
The examples below show some of the ways your post permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring permalinks)
If you need help setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs
Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Let’s look at 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 dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No site is completely immune from being targeted.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to botnets and hackers.
For more information, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(Yoast SEO – WP Plugin)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find, classify and index, it also lets you specify how to display your content to Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with others online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can easily add social features to your site using WordPress plugins.
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 notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Configuring WordPress Traffic Generation Theme Features
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, many themes also give you options for improving SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) can be configured for improved traffic results)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your content is as easy as clicking a few buttons and enabling the function …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic System Configuration – Other Steps
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.
These include the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you are making money online (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your website is found to comply with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Legally Compliant?)
We have written a detailed article on how to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress site here:
Tags And Categories
Post tags and post categories help search engines better organize and index your website, which improves traffic.
(Categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better classify and index your web pages.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s tags and categories should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the tags and categories that have been set up.
HTML Site Map
A site map that lists all of your posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications discover 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 not the same things. HTML site maps are web pages that provide readers with a an understandable representation of how your content is organized, while XML sitemaps are code that only search engine bots can read. Although search engines like Google will index your site just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – An Additional Source Of Web Traffic!
When online users type in the wrong URL or click on an invalid hyperlink, they are greeted with a 404 error page …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up in your server, there are several plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your site has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do then to begin attracting more traffic is publish content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different components and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise required to perform this stage of the traffic automation process can take many web developers months to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read more, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of articles designed to help you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively with a WordPress-powered website and proven online marketing strategies.
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"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)
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