Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic generation machine using WordPress.
In Part One of this article series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is publish content consistently to start generating more web traffic!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase. We explained 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 site, and what to do if your existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this article, we will look at the configuration phase of this process. You will learn how a WordPress site should be configured in order to automatically attract new traffic whenever you publish new content on your website.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. With business becoming so much more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth learning about every opportunity you can to improve your own performance and results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge advantage over other competitors. With an expertly configured WordPress site, your business has a flying start as soon as your site is launched.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to explain the key difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get 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 more work required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
A Semi-True Story …
Things are moving along in the gizmo manufacturing plant when everything suddenly ceases working.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Soon afterward, the expert arrives and, without uttering a word, heads straight towards the main control box. After staring silently at the circuit board for less than 2 minutes or so, the expert then produces a teeny-weeny hammer from his tool box and makes a single tap about two inches from the left side of the unit.
Immediately, the plant springs back to life.
The plant manager is overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the manager receives a bill for $5,000.
Feeling angry, the manager dials the expert. Demanding to know why they were expected to pay so much for so little time spent delivering such minimal amount of work, he then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice arrives and is placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive visitors consistently to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one on the factory floor had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to ask to be compensated fairly for years spent building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to immediately avert a very serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WordPress site fully configured so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social sites and dozens of other online properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
Although the solution to many problems is often quite easy in hindsight, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring some basic settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which programs need to be installed to get certain functionalities on your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up and activate to get desired outcomes
- Which options need to be configured to ensure that things function as envisioned, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite involved. It’s not as easy as installing a piece of software, tweaking some options and settings in your dashboard area … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a complex process that involves your web hosting server, your site, and various third-party sites and online services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If we were to create a simple diagram of the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram showing the configuration process)
Let’s take a better look at these steps.
Configuring Your Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for website installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings in your hosting account specifically for handling 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 beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic your site may attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like server-level spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess and 404 redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these, the next step is to set up and configure a number of external sites and online solutions.
External Sites And Services – Configuration
The purpose of choosing external sites is that all content should be posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it will get syndicated automatically to other components of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external platforms have been added to your system, content with links pointing back to your site is automatically posted to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content will benefit from additional exposure online, helping your business tap into a whole new audience and traffic source.
Some of the external sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site’s settings 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:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Search Console lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with a range of useful data, SEO tools and reports about your website.
After setting up your account and entering site data with Google Webmaster Tools, this information can be used to automate web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site details are set up, account code can be added to all of your web pages in WordPress using any of several Google Analytics plugins and automatically fed to other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your account is with Bing have been set up, this information can be used with web traffic settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress provides users with the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you are planning to grow 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 at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your automated web traffic system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and bring new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social accounts set up 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 bring new visitors to your site.
You should have profiles set up with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can You can syndicate your content to many social sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just select those that will work well with your system and/or content syndication tools.
(There are lots of social sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as second-tier sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your own RebelMouse page.
There are various sites and platforms that can be incorporated into your traffic system. Please contact us if you would like to explore this area further and discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
Global Settings
By default, your WordPress administration area includes a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains an important and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As stated below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely configured your site settings to prevent 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 text box
By default, this section contains only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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 summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to get the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The main setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to automatically notify your list of update services when a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your permalinks …
(Configuring post permalinks)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: How To Set Up Your WordPress Permalinks
Plugin Settings
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add almost every kind of functionality to your site, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to attract more visitors to your site
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No website or blog is completely safe from cyberattacks.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and bots.
More info:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your site more search engine friendly …
(SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help increase traffic by making your website more search engine friendly)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index, it also lets you configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using WordPress plugins)
There are many free or inexpensive social sharing plugins available for WordPress.
Most social share plugins let you specify which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which users can unlock by sharing your page.
WordPress Theme Features – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring design and layout elements of your site, many themes also provide built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many 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 to your website is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Additional Areas Of WordPress To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the traffic configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Compliance Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you do business online (or plan to), it’s important that your site stays compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done.
(Is Your Site Compliant?)
For a detailed article on the importance of having a compliant website, go here:
Tags & Categories
WordPress post tags & categories help search engines better organize and index your web pages, which helps you get more traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your web pages.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s categories and tags should be set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Process.
When looking at ways to automate and improve 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 results.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A site map that displays all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools 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 thing. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, while an XML sitemap is mostly code that only search bots can interpret. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just from 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 can result in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – Don’t Forget To Configure It!
When visitors searching for your site enter the wrong URL or click on a link pointing to a page on your site that no longer exists, they are greeted with a 404 Not Found error page …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
A 404 Error Page can be configured into a useful source of traffic to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your web server, there are several WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your website fully set up and expertly configured, all you then need to do to generate more web traffic is post content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many 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 Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help small business owners learn how to grow their business online and drive traffic sustainably with a WordPress website and proven marketing methods that are easy and quick to implement.
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