Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to attract more traffic is post new content consistently!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we will discuss the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. We will help you understand why an expertly configured WordPress site is different from a professionally configured one. You will also discover what type of work is required to ensure that when everything is set up and fully configured, visitors will automatically start flowing simply by regularly posting new content to your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive worldwide and are researching every advantage they can to increase their competitiveness online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand is a huge advantage over the competition. For WordPress users, an expertly configured website allows their business to get off with a flying start from the moment their website is launched.
The Configuration Stage Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to understand the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a web presence plus an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does it take additional work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special kind of expert knowledge.
Allow me to illustrate this with an amusing story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All is working according to schedule in the gizmo workshop when production suddenly comes to a halt.
As no one can figure out what’s wrong, the manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert immediately heads towards the main control box. After staring silently at the wires and circuitry for no more than 5 minutes or so, the expert then takes out a tiny hammer and makes a very gentle tap near the left-hand corner of the control unit.
Immediately, the whole machinery springs back to life.
The floor manager is greatly relieved as he thanks the expert, who leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the manager receives a bill for $5,000.
Bewildered and angry, the factory manager dials the expert. Demanding to know why they were expected to pay 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 arrives and is placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving traffic to their sites.
How much money did the plant stand to lose when the machines stopped working and no one on the business was able to fix it? Did the expert not have the right to ask to be compensated fairly for years spent acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly assess and repair a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your website set up and configured so all you ever had 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 challenges may seem ridiculously easy once it’s been implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring some basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which 3rd-party services need to be set up to get desired results
- Which settings you need to configure to make sure things function the way you want, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this part of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite involved and time-consuming. It’s not as simple as installing and configuring a piece of software, tweaking some options and settings in your admin area or clicking on a button or two … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of many components such as your web hosting server, your site, and a number of external sites and/or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we were to create a simplified diagram showing the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for site installation purposes. What we are talking about, is configuring settings in your web server that affect how your website will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your web server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic your business will attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include things like spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess and error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting 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 of the configuration phase is to set up a number of third-party sites and services.
External Web Properties & Services – Configuration
The basic concept of setting up external sites is that all content should be published from one central location (your site) and from there, radiate outwards to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After incorporating these external platforms into your setup, content with links pointing back to your website will get automatically fed to search, social and aggregator sites. Your business will be given additional exposure to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of these web properties and online solutions will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress settings 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 Webmasters lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with important information, tools and reports about your website.
Once your account and site details with Google Search Console are set up, your details 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 traffic performance, SEO, marketing efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrals, etc.
After setting up your up your Google Analytics account and entered your site details, your account information can be added to WordPress using a simple Google Analytics plugin used with other applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your Bing Webmaster Tools account and entering site details, use this information to integrate and automate web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, 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 this into your automated traffic generation system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need your various social accounts set up in order to 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 traffic to your site.
You should have accounts and profiles set up with all the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose the ones that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools (we will look at some of these tools in more detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(There are many social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary-level traffic generation sources. 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 an RSS feed from your website …
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 RebelMouse account.
There are various solutions that can be incorporated into your own traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up third-party site accounts, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
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 key areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
The WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most powerful and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As described in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally configured your settings 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, when WordPress is installed, only one service is available …
(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 takes care of the rest …
(You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress!)
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 traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to read the rest of the content from summaries, 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 in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.
Normally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to instantly notify various update services whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion
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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
We have written a detailed tutorial about using WordPress permalinks here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs
WordPress – Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality imaginable to your site, including traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help drive more traffic
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, website security is something you cannot afford to ignore.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
For more information, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website …
(SEO plugins help increase traffic by improving your site’s SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to find, classify and index, it also lets you specify how to present your content to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with members of their own online communities can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins.
Many social sharing plugins let you choose which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to protect content which users can unlock by liking your page.
WP Theme Features
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, many themes also provide built-in features that let you improve SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) allow you to configure options and settings for better traffic results)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your content is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Additional Features Of WordPress To Configure For Improved Traffic Flow
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic configuration process, are the components that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can hurt your business as more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your website remains compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?)
For a detailed article about the importance of having a compliant website, refer to this article:
Post Categories And Post Tags
Post categories & tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better organize and index your pages.
(Post categories help search engines classify and index your web pages, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s post tags and post categories during the Website Planning Process.
When configuring your site to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the tags and categories that have been set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A visitor site map that displays all of your posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications find more of your web content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. Although Google can index your pages just using 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.
Don’t Forget Your WordPress 404 Page Not Found
When visitors enter the wrong web address or click on hyperlinks pointing to destinations on your website that no longer exist, they will typically be presented with an error page …
(A 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error page can be set up on your web server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do to automatically start generating more web traffic is post content consistently.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of different elements and web properties …
(WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some website developers months to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is explained in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive article series designed to help you learn how to grow your business with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven online marketing strategies.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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