Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated traffic generating machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to begin bringing new traffic is add content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we looked at critical setup decisions. We explained 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 site, and what to do if your existing site was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this section of the series, we look at the configuration phase of the WordPress traffic automation system. You will learn how a WordPress site should be configured in order to automatically drive visitors just by regularly posting new content on your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business becoming ever more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth learning about any opportunity you can to increase your own competitiveness online.
Having the ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a huge competitive advantage. Having an expertly configured WordPress site gives you a flying start and a significant competitive advantage online.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a 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’s one way to explain the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only is additional work required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special kind of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing story.
Knowing Where To Tap
All is moving along in the gizmo workshop when all of a sudden, all machinery comes to a complete stop.
As no one can figure out what went wrong, the floor manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert heads out directly to the main control box. After staring at the wiring board for less than 3 minutes, the expert then takes out a teeny-weeny hammer from his shirt pocket and makes a single tap near the bottom-left corner of the box.
Immediately, everything starts working as before.
The floor manager is overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager receives a request for payment of $5,000.
Outraged and furious, the factory manager picks up the phone and calls the expert. Why did he charge them such a ludicrous fee for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one in the factory floor was able to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to demand fair compensation for having invested years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly repair a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your WP blog set up so all you have to do is publish content to it and search engines, social sites like Facebook and Twitter and dozens of other online 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 attracting new visitors to your website?)
Although experts often make complex situations and problems look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which services need to be set up to get certain outcomes
- Which settings need to be configured to make sure everything will work how you have envisioned, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite involved and complicated. The reason why is because it’s not just about installing and configuring a piece of software, clicking a button, or tweaking some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of different parts such as your web server, your website, and a number of external sites and/or online services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these steps.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about tweaking settings in your server that affect how your website will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic your site may attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for both good and bad traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like configuring spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been fine-tuned and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of external sites and online services.
External Sites
The purpose of setting up external sites is that all content will be posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it will get distributed automatically to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external services have been added to your setup, content pointing back to your website will be automatically published on search, social and aggregator sites. Your content and business will then receive exposure online, helping your business tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some sites and online platforms 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, you will want to set up the following accounts:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmasters)
Google Webmasters lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with a range of important data, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account and site data with Google are set up, you can use the information to automate traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s performance, SEO, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, your account code can be added to all of your pages in WordPress using a Google Analytics plugin used with other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account with Bing Webmaster Tools are set up, this information can be used with traffic-related 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 platform if you plan to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which various 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 web traffic generation system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and attract new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social media accounts set up 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 and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site.
You should have profiles set up with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are many social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to go crazy, just select those that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(You can syndicate your content to many social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online web platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add a feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your website.
There are various platforms you can add to your traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up external service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring WordPress Settings
By default, all WordPress installations include a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Screen)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and often overlooked traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Area)
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 chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services text box
By default, this section includes only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section and WordPress will do the rest …
(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 on this page can have an influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could play a part in someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your site 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.
The main setting here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables your site to ping various update services when new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
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 Section)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings Screen)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring post permalinks)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about setting up WP permalinks, go here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks
WordPress Traffic Plugin Settings – Configuration
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add just about every type of functionality 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 dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, website security is something you cannot ignore.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to botnet and hacker attacks.
More information:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web content easier for search engines to index …
(Yoast SEO – WP SEO Plugin)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines to find, crawl and index, it also lets you specify how to present your content to Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you post content that adds real value to readers.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
There are loads of free or inexpensive social sharing plugins to choose from.
Most social sharing plugins allow you to choose which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
Configuring Settings – Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, some themes also give you options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for better traffic results)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons to your content is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic Configuration – Other Steps
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for both good and bad 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 engage in any form of business online, it’s important that your website is compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate online business practices.
(Does Your Website Comply With The Law?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, go here:
WordPress Tags And Categories
WordPress post tags & categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your website.
(Categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your website.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to discuss and set up your site’s categories and tags during the Website Planning Phases.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories you have set up.
Add A Site Map
A site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites find your web content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. Although 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 can result in increased traffic.
Your 404 Page
When visitors searching online for your website type in the wrong URL or click on an invalid link, they are greeted with an error – page not found message (known as a 404 page) …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect 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 from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your site fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do to begin bringing new traffic is post fresh content consistently.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different components and external web properties …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The skills and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take many web professionals months to learn.
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 article in our series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of an article series designed to help you learn how to grow your business and drive traffic automatically using a WordPress website and proven web marketing strategies.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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