Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using WordPress.
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is post new content on a consistent basis to attract more traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this section of the series, we discuss the configuration stage of the traffic automation process. We explain how to configure a WordPress site so you can bring new traffic automatically as you begin adding content on your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by website owners as their greatest challenge online. With business becoming increasingly more competitive worldwide, it’s worth looking into any and every advantage available to get better results online.
Having the ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a huge advantage over other competitors. With an expertly configured WordPress site, your business has a flying start from the moment your website is launched.
Configuration Is 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 take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here’s a simple way to describe the differences:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special kind of expertise.
Let me illustrate this with a joke.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
All was moving along in the widget-making assembly line when the equipment suddenly ground to a halt.
As no one could figure out what happened, the plant manager decided to call in an expert.
The expert arrived soon afterward and immediately walked to the control box. After staring at the wiring board for 2 minutes, the expert then took out a little hammer from his tool belt and made a single tap about 3 cm from the bottom-right side of the box.
Immediately, the whole workshop lit up and returned once again to normal.
The manager was filled with joy 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 a request for payment of $5,000.
The factory manager rang back the expert, demanding to know why the expert had charged them such an exorbitant fee for less than 5 minutes work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrived and was placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive web traffic consistently to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the factory stand to lose when the machines stopped functioning and no one in the factory floor had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have every right to be compensated fairly for spending years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to assess and repair a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a blog configured so all you have to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other online properties would be instantly notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your website?)
While the solution to many challenges is often quite easy once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring basic settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install to get certain functionalities on your site.
- Which services you need to set up to get desired results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured to make sure everything works exactly as you have envisioned, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This stage of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite involved. It’s not just about installing and configuring one or two plugins, tweaking some settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of different components such as your web server, your WordPress site, and a number of third-party sites and services …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If we create a simplified diagram showing all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart of the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved in more detail.
Server Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your hosting account for website installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings and options in your hosting account specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your website can attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like implementing spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and services.
Integration With External Sites
The concept behind adding external sites is that all content is published to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it radiates outwards automatically to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you incorporate these external platforms into your setup, content with links pointing back to your site is automatically added to these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social sites, even to visitors attracted to the platform itself. Your content and business will receive exposure online, helping you tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some third-party sites will need to be set up before configuring your settings to speed up the process 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 Webmasters
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of essential information, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your Google Webmasters account has been set up, use the information with web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
After setting up your account, you can add your account code to WordPress via a plugin and send data instantly to various other useful applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account and site data with Bing Webmaster Tools are set up, the information can be used with traffic settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers website owners a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your traffic system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new traffic to your site)
You will need your social media and social bookmarking accounts set up before you can 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 pages and get new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts and pages set up with all the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social sites you can You can post your content to loads of social sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(You can post your content to many social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve 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 lets you add an RSS feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your own RebelMouse website.
There are many different solutions you can add to your own web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore this area further and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up third-party service accounts, it’s time to configure your site.
Configuring Your WordPress Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
The WordPress administration area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and often overlooked traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Section)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services box
By default, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section …
(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 on this page can have an influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your blog 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 main setting here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Typically, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to instantly ping your update services list whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(WordPress Settings – 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 content, 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 Section)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings Screen)
The examples below show some of the ways your SEO-friendly URLs can be configured …
(Configuring permalinks)
To learn more about setting up WordPress permalinks, refer to this step-by-step tutorial: Configuring WordPress Permalinks
Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that can add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that improve traffic generation
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site 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, you simply cannot afford to ignore the importance of website security.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to botnets and hackers.
Go here to learn more:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages easier for search engines like Google to index …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress Plugin)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines to index, it allows you to configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social features to your website with WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Most social sharing plugins let you specify which social sites your content can be shared 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 set up protected content sections on your site which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WordPress Traffic Features In Themes
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 website, many themes also provide built-in options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a free theme) have built-in traffic optimization features)
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 have built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic System Configuration – Other Areas
Last (but by no means least) in the traffic configuration process, are the components that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you are making money online (or are planning to), you need to ensure that your website complies with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate online business practices.
(Does Your Website Comply With The Law?)
For a detailed article about why it’s important to have a legally compliant website, go here:
WordPress Tags & Post Categories
WordPress post tags & categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your pages.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your web pages.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your website’s post tags and categories earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal benefits.
Add A Site Map
A site map that displays all of your pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications discover 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 things. Only search engine bots can read an XML sitemap. Although search engines like Google will index your site just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Page – A Source Of Lost Traffic Opportunities!
When online visitors type in the wrong URL into their browser or click on an invalid link, they will typically be presented with a 404 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 redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your server, there are several WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your site has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then to automatically attract new web traffic is post content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different components and external web properties …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The skills and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take some web developers months to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is covered in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Section Three
To keep reading this article, click here:
This article is part of an article series aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business using a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven online marketing strategies.
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