Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic generation machine using WordPress.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is publish content consistently to generate more traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase. 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 site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will look at the configuration phase of the traffic automation process. We will explain what makes an expertly configured WordPress site different than a professionally configured site, and how much work needs to be done to ensure that when everything is set up and fully configured, web traffic will automatically start flowing as you begin publishing fresh content to your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by website owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With business getting so much more competitive worldwide, it’s worth learning about any and every advantage that can help you increase your own competitiveness online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can be a huge advantage over the competition. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website means having a significant advantage from the word “go”.
The Configuration Phase Is The Difference
There is a 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’s one way to explain the main difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only are more steps needed 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 anecdote.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
Everything was going fine in the widget-making manufacturing plant when things suddenly ground to a stop.
No one could figure out what has gone wrong and so the manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert headed immediately towards the control box. After staring at the circuit board for no more than 3 minutes, the expert then took out a tiny hammer from his shirt pocket and made a single tap near the right edge of the control unit.
Immediately, every machine sprang to life.
The plant manager was greatly relieved as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager received an invoice for $5,000.
The manager rang back the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged such a ludicrous fee for less than five minutes work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrived on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new visitors to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when the machines stopped working and no one on the factory floor had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have every right to demand fair compensation for having spent years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly repair a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your web site configured so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other traffic-generating web 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 driving traffic to your site?)
Although experts often make difficult solutions look easy, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than just installing a website and configuring some basic settings. It involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed to get specific functionalities on your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts need to be set up and activated to get certain outcomes
- Which options need to be configured to ensure that everything works exactly as you have envisioned, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically challenging, it can be quite complicated. It’s not as simple as installing a solution, clicking on a button or two … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of many different parts including your server, your website, and a number of external sites …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the configuration phase)
Let’s examine what’s involved in more detail.
Configuring The Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for website installation purposes. What we are talking about, is tweaking settings in your web hosting account specifically for handling all web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your website may attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for both good and unwanted traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like integrating spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up 404 error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirections, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites.
External Sites & Services – Configuration
The purpose of setting up external sites is that all content should be published from a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will automatically get syndicated to other parts of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external platforms have been added to your traffic network, content linked back to your site will be automatically fed to these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social media sites, even to users of the platform itself. Your content and website benefits from increased exposure online, helping your business tap into new sources of traffic.
Some of the third-party 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 before configuring your site’s settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmasters)
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 important information, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account with Google Webmaster Tools are set up, you can use this information to automate 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 behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrals, etc.
After setting up your up your account and site data has been entered, you can add tracking information to all of your web pages in WordPress using a plugin and feed data automatically to other online applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account has been set up, use your information to automate traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress provides users with a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to grow 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 with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your traffic generation system in Part Four of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your various social accounts 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 visitors to your site.
You should have accounts and profiles set up with all the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can set up and syndicate your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose those that will work well with your setup and/or content syndication tools (we discuss some of these tools in more detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(There are many social sites you can post your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging web platforms and content aggregators that can serve as second-tier sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator 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 users can follow your RebelMouse website.
There are various technologies and third-party applications you can add to your web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up third-party site accounts, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global WordPress Settings
By default, all WordPress installations include a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Section)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains an important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings)
As described below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the update services entered into the Update Services box
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section lists only one entry …
(Writing Settings – WordPress Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services 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
***
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 in this section can influence traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to read the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting in this section as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to instantly ping the list of update services whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion
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
Your Permalink settings allow your site to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings Section)
Here are some of the ways your site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
If you need help setting up permalinks, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Plugin Settings
WordPress provides users with plugins that help to 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
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what 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 ignore.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to botnet and hacker attacks.
More information:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages easy for search engines like Google and Bing to index …
(WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help increase traffic by improving your website’s SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines to find, crawl and index, it also lets you configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with their social networks can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
You can easily add social sharing to your site using WordPress plugins.
Many social share plugins let you choose which 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 shares), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your pages which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, many themes also provide built-in options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your site is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons and enabling the feature …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Other Areas To Configure
Last but not least in the configuration process, are the areas that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and unwanted traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you are making money online, it’s important that your website stays compliant with all government legal requirements.
(Does Your Site Comply With The Law?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, see this article:
WordPress Post Tags & Categories
WordPress post tags & categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search engine optimization.
(Post categories help to improve your site’s search optimization, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your website’s categories and tags earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s tags and categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal benefits and results.
Add A Site Map
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites discover your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although search engines like Google will index your site 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 can result in increased traffic.
Your 404 Page
When visitors searching online for your site enter the wrong URL or click on a hyperlink pointing to an incorrect destination on your site, they will normally be presented with an error page (known as a 404 error page) …
(A 404 Page)
A 404 page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error page can be set up on your server, there are several WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do to automatically bring more web traffic is post great content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring a 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 skills and expertise required to perform this phase of the traffic automation process typically takes many web developers months to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is addressed in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint 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 tutorial series designed to help business owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively using a WordPress website and proven marketing methods that are easy to implement.
Get Notified When New Tutorials Are Published – Subscribe To Our Site!
***
"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com
***