Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your website into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this article series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically bring web traffic is post web content regularly!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase of this process. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site 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 look at the configuration stage of this process. The focus of this section is to help you understand what makes an expertly configured site different. You will also understand just what kind of work is required to make sure that when everything is fully set up and configured, traffic will automatically start flowing when you start to add new content on your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration Phase
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business getting ever more competitive, it’s worth looking into any and every opportunity you can to increase your own competitiveness online.
Having the ability to automatically generate traffic on demand is a huge advantage. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website allows their business to get off to a flying start as soon as their website is launched.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
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 take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s a simple way to describe the differences:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a web presence plus an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only are more steps required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
To illustrate this here’s a story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All was going according to schedule in the gizmo assembly line when everything ground to a sudden halt.
No one could figure out what has happened and so the plant manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert headed immediately towards the main control box. After staring silently at the box for no more than 2 minutes, the expert then produced a teeny-weeny hammer from his tool box and made a gentle tap about 1 inch from the left-hand corner of the control unit.
Immediately, everything sprang to life once again.
The floor manager was delighted as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the manager received a bill for $5,000.
The manager called the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged such a ludicrous fee for less than 5 minutes work and then 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 #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive traffic to their sites.
How much money did the widget 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 in our story not have every right to demand fair compensation for years spent building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to immediately repair a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your web site configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and search engines, social media and dozens of other online properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(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 often seems quite simple in hindsight, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to figure things out.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than installing a website and configuring a few settings. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which plugins need to be installed to get various functionalities on your site.
- Which third-party accounts need to be set up to get certain results
- Which options need to be configured in order to ensure that things will work to plan, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite involved. This is because it’s not just about installing a solution, tweaking some options and settings in your admin area or clicking a button … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a process that involves your web server, your site, and various third-party sites …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we were to create a simple flowchart showing the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified flowchart of all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these areas in more detail.
Your Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about configuring settings in your web server that affect how your site will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your 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 website may attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security 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 includes looking at things like implementing spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirections, etc?)
After fine-tuning your server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of third-party sites.
Integration With External Sites
The concept behind choosing external sites is that all content should be published from a central location (your site) and from there, get distributed automatically to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you incorporate these external platforms into your traffic network, content linking back to your website will get automatically fed to these platforms. Your content and site benefits from added exposure online, helping you tap into a whole new audience and source of traffic.
Some of the third-party sites and online services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress settings to help speed up the process 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 Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with useful data, tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account, your account details can be used with web traffic 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 site’s performance, SEO, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrals, etc.
After setting up your Once you have set up Google Analytics, visitor tracking information can be added to WordPress using any of several Google Analytics plugins and and fed to other useful applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account and entering site details with Bing, this information can be used with web traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers both the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your traffic generation system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new traffic to your site)
You will need to set up your social media and social bookmarking accounts before you can 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 have pages set up with all the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up and post your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just select the ones that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools (we discuss some of these tools in greater detail during the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to lots of social bookmarking sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary-level sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free levels, 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 a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your RebelMouse page.
There are various platforms you can add to your own web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with third-party services, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website Or Blog
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
Global WordPress Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains a powerful and often overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As stated below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically configured your settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services field
By default, this section includes only one entry …
(WordPress Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section and WordPress takes care of 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 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 traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could play a part in 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 a partial feed, 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 here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Typically, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to automatically ping your update services list when new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion
Although this section is 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks Screen)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s post permalinks …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
We have written a detailed tutorial on using permalinks in WordPress here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring Settings – WP Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality to your website, including traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
WordPress 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, you cannot ignore the importance of securing your website or blog.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and bots.
More info:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages easy for search engines like Google to index …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress Plugins For SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO can significantly improve your site’s SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages 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 pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content with members of their online communities can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social plugins let you choose which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads which users can unlock by sharing 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, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, many themes also provide built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in traffic optimization features)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing features to your content is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic Automation – Other Important Features To Configure
Last but not least in the web traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in visitor numbers, 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 start finding and visiting your website.
If you engage in any form of business online (or plan to), it’s important that your website stays compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, go here:
WordPress Post Tags And Categories
Tags and categories help search engines index your website, which helps to increase traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your pages.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your website’s post tags and post categories during the Website Planning Process.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the tags and categories that have been set up.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
A visitor site map that lists all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites discover your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. Although Google can index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – An Additional Source Of Traffic!
When visitors searching for your site enter the wrong web address or click on a hyperlink pointing to an incorrect destination on your site, they will normally be greeted with an error page (known as a 404 Not Found page) …
(Default WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
A 404 page can be turned into a useful source of traffic to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your server, there are several plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your website has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then is post fresh content on a consistent basis to bring traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different components and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The skills and knowledge involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some website professionals a long time to learn.
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 article in the WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 3
To continue reading about this topic, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help site owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively with a WordPress website or blog and proven marketing methods that are easy and quick to implement.
Get Notified When New Tutorials Get Published – Subscribe To WPCompendium.org!
***
"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
***