Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website 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 web site, all you have to do is publish fresh content consistently to begin attracting web traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase of the automation process. We helped you understand 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 was built with 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 system. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to automatically bring web traffic whenever you add web content on your site.
WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Phase
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as their greatest challenge online. With business becoming increasingly more competitive worldwide, it’s worth learning about every advantage available to get better results online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand is a tremendous advantage. For WordPress users, an expertly configured website allows their business to get off to a flying start from the moment their website is launched.
The Configuration Process Is What Makes All The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to describe the difference:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does it take extra labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special type of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with a little story.
A Semi-True Story …
All is running smoothly in the widget assembly plant when all of a sudden, everything grounds to a halt.
As no one can figure out what’s wrong, the manager decides to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert immediately walks towards the control box. After staring silently at the board for less than 2 minutes, the expert then produces a tiny little hammer from his tool box and makes a single tap about 1 cm from the left-hand corner of the unit.
Immediately, everything returns to normal.
The manager is grateful and relieved 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.
Feeling angry, the manager rings the expert. Demanding to know why they have been charged so much for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of work, he then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive visitors to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the plant stand to lose when the machines stopped functioning and no one in the business was able to fix it? Did the expert not have the right to be compensated fairly for investing years developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WP website or blog set up so all you have to do is publish new content and search engines, social media and dozens of other online 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 website?)
While many experts often make difficult solutions look easy, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring basic settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs need to be installed for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up and activated to achieve specific outcomes
- Which options need to be configured in order to make sure processes will run as expected, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not so technically difficult, but it’s quite complicated. This is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring a piece of software, clicking a button … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of different parts such as your web hosting server, your WordPress site, and a number of external sites and online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we create a simplified diagram showing the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart of the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for site installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is tweaking settings and options in your server that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic you will attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step is to set up and configure various third-party sites.
Configuring External Web Properties
The basic idea of choosing external sites is that all of your content gets posted to one central location (your site) and from there, it radiates outwards automatically to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After adding these external platforms to your setup, content with links pointing back to your website is automatically posted to these platforms, indexed by search engines and distributed to social media accounts, even to users of the platform itself. Your content and site will be exposed to a new audience and new sources of traffic.
Some of these sites and services will need to have accounts 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 before configuring your site’s settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmasters)
Google Webmasters 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, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your Google Webmasters account has been set up, this information can be used with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s performance, SEO, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your up your Google Analytics account and site details has been entered, you can add traffic monitoring code to all of your web pages in WordPress via a Google Analytics plugin and feed data automatically to various other useful applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your account and site details with Bing have been set up, use this information with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers website owners a self-hosted (WordPress.org) and a hosted (WordPress.com) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you are planning to grow a professional online 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 show you how to integrate these features into your automated web traffic generation system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(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 accounts in order to 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 get new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have accounts and profiles set up with all the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can You can syndicate your content to loads of social sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick the ones that will work well with your system and/or content syndication tools.
(There are many social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online web platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your own RebelMouse account.
There are various technologies and third-party applications that can be incorporated into your web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up third-party site accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
Your WordPress administration area contains a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains a powerful and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As stated 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 specifically configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services box
By default, only one service is listed …
(WordPress 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 Settings
This section affects how your content gets seen by visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content appears 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 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 here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to ping various update services when new posts get 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 …
(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 sites 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the options for configuring your permalinks …
(Configuring post permalinks)
If you need help setting up WordPress permalinks, see this tutorial: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring Settings – WP Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add just about every kind of functionality to your site, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
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 handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No website or blog is safe from cyberattacks.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to botnets and hackers.
More info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your site more search engine friendly …
(Yoast SEO – WP SEO Plugin)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s SEO. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines to index, it allows you to specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you post content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features 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 update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads which visitors can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Configuring Settings – Themes
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 provide built-in options for improving SEO and site linking structure for faster indexing, add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes allow you to configure options and settings for improved traffic results)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing features to your website is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Configuring Other WordPress Areas For Improved Traffic
Last (but by no means least) in the traffic configuration process, are the areas that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to your business when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you do any kind of business online (or plan to), you need to make sure that your website is found to comply with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
To learn more about why it’s important to have a legally compliant website, see this article:
Tags And Post Categories
WordPress post tags and post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your website.
(Categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s tags and categories should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
When looking at ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post categories and tags have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits.
Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications find your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. HTML site maps are web pages that link to all other content on your site and provide readers with a visual map of how your content is structured, whereas XML sitemaps contain code that only search bots can understand. Although Google can index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which plugins 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 Page – Another Source Of Traffic!
When visitors enter the wrong URL or click on hyperlinks pointing to destinations on your site that no longer exist, they will normally be presented with a 404 page …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to recover 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 error page can be set up in your web server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do is publish new content on a consistent basis to automatically start generating more web traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of different components and web properties …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration process typically takes some website developers months to acquire.
Once you have expertly 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 keep reading this article, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive tutorial series aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively using a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven online marketing methods.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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