Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is add new content consistently to automatically begin bringing traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this section of the series, we discuss the configuration stage of the WordPress traffic automation system. We will show you what makes an expertly configured WordPress site different, and what kind of work is required to ensure that when everything is fully set up and configured, you can automatically begin to get traffic as you begin to publish web content to your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration Phase
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by business owners as their greatest challenge online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive and are looking for every advantage they can to increase their competitiveness online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge advantage over other competitors. An expertly configured WordPress site gives your business a significant competitive advantage from the word “go”.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site 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 explain the main difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expert knowledge.
Allow me to illustrate this point with a little story.
A Semi-True Story …
All was running smoothly in the widget assembly workshop when the machines suddenly came to a halt.
No one could figure out what has happened and so the manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
The expert arrived within in less than 30 minutes and, without saying a word, immediately headed to the main control box. After staring silently at the wiring diagrams for what seemed like 5 minutes or less, the expert then produced a teensy-weensy hammer and made a gentle tap about 1 cm from the top-left edge of the control unit.
Immediately, every machine began working as before.
The manager was greatly overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the manager received an invoice for $5,000.
The factory manager dialled the expert, demanding to know why they were being charged so much for less than five minutes work and then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrived and was placed in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive web traffic to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the factory stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one in the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have every right to demand fair compensation for having invested years building up the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to assess and repair a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your WordPress blog configured so all you have to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest 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 driving traffic to your website?)
While the solution to many problems often seems quite simple once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring some of the site settings for clients. It involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which third-party accounts need to be set up and activated to get certain outcomes
- Which options need to be configured to ensure that everything works as envisioned, etc.
(Driving web 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. This is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring a piece of software, clicking on a button or two, or configuring some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a complex process that involves your web server, your site, and various third-party sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If we create a simple diagram showing the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic diagram of the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a brief look at these steps.
Configuring Your Web Server
We’re not talking 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 in your server that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic your business will attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both good and unwanted traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include things like server-level spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up 404 error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting 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 is to set up and configure various external sites.
Third-Party Accounts Integration
The purpose of choosing external sites is that all content is posted to one central location (your site) and from there, it gets automatically distributed to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external services have been added to your network, content linked back to your site will be automatically syndicated to these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social sites, even to users of the platform itself. Your content and site will then receive exposure online, helping you tap into a new audience and traffic source.
Some of the sites and services will need to have accounts 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, here are just some of the accounts you will need to have set up:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console)
Google Search Console lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of useful information, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your account has been with Google are set up, your details can be used to automate traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data are set up, traffic monitoring information can be added to WordPress using plugins and automatically sent to other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account and entering site details with Bing, use your details to integrate and automate web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers users a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you are planning to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great 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 this into your automated traffic system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get 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 attract new traffic to your site.
You should set up profiles with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can set up. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose the ones that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools (we will review some of these tools in more detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to loads of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online platforms and content aggregators that can act as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different user types.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add an RSS feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your account.
There are many different solutions you can add to your web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
Configuring WordPress Settings
Your WordPress admin area contains a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and often overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(WordPress 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 have intentionally chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services box
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section includes only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of all the update services you want to notify as soon as you publish a new post 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
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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 in this section can influence web traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers 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 website to get 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 most important setting here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Normally, you want to encourage 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 you have a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
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 articles, 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 Screen)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks Section)
The examples below show some of the ways your search-friendly URLS can be configured …
(Configuring permalinks)
If you need help setting up permalinks, refer to this tutorial: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins – Configuration
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality to your site, including traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No blog is guaranteed immunity from being attacked by hackers.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to botnets and hackers.
More information:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web pages more search engine friendly …
(WordPress SEO plugins help increase traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google 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.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Most social sharing 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 likes), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WordPress – Traffic Generation Theme Features
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, some themes also give you built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With many themes, adding social sharing features to your content is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and unwanted traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to your business when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you make money online (or are planning to), it’s important that your website complies with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, see this article:
WordPress Categories And Tags
Tags & post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.
(Categories help search engines index your website, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your site’s tags and categories during the Website Planning Phases.
When configuring your website or blog to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and post categories have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites find your web content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, while an XML sitemap contains code that only search bots can understand. Although search engines like Google can index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which plugins 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 – Don’t Lose Traffic!
When visitors searching online for your website enter the wrong web address or click on a link pointing to a destination on your website that no longer exists, they are greeted with a 404 Not Found error page …
(A WordPress 404 Error Page)
A 404 Not Found page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up in your server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your website has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do to generate web traffic is publish new content consistently.
The process of expertly configuring a 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 Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some web professionals months to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is explained in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Section Three
To continue reading, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of an article series designed to help you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively with a WordPress website or blog and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
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