Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your website into an automated web traffic generating machine using WordPress.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is post fresh content on a consistent basis to automatically begin attracting new traffic!)
In Part Two, 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 website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic automation process. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site to ensure that traffic will automatically start flowing simply by consistently adding web content to your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Businesses are becoming ever more competitive on a global scale and are exploring every advantage they believe will increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge competitive advantage. For businesses, having an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start as soon as their website is launched.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to describe the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only is extra work required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special type of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
Everything is moving along in the widget-making factory when things come to a sudden stop.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert goes immediately to the control box. After staring silently at the wiring diagrams for 3 minutes or less, the expert then takes out a teeny-weeny hammer and makes a gentle tap about three cm from the right corner of the control unit.
Immediately, the whole machine springs to life again.
The plant manager is greatly overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the manager receives a service bill for $5,000.
Bewildered, the factory manager rings the expert. Demanding to know why they have been charged such a large amount of money for less than five minutes work, he then requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice arrives in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive web traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the widget plant stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one in the factory floor was able to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to demand fair compensation for years spent developing the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to assess and repair a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your website fully configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and search engines, social networking sites and dozens of other web properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
While many experts often make complicated situations and problems look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring settings for clients. It also requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs need to be installed to get certain functionalities on your site.
- Which services need to be set up to achieve certain outcomes
- Which options you need to configure to ensure that everything will function as envisioned, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This part of the traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite complicated. The reason why is because it’s not just about installing and configuring one or two plugins, tweaking some options and settings in your dashboard area … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration phase involves the integration of different components including your web server, your website, and a number of third-party sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine what’s involved.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for site installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is tweaking settings in your server that affect how your website 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 beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic your site can attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like implementing spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these, the next step is to configure various external sites and/or online services.
External Sites
The basic idea of setting up external sites is that all content is published to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it gets automatically distributed to other components of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you incorporate these external services into your traffic network, content with links pointing back to your site will be automatically fed to search, social and aggregator sites. Your content will then be exposed to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some of these sites and online platforms will need to have accounts set up before configuring your settings to speed up the configuration 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 before configuring your site’s settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmasters)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with useful data, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account has been set up, your details can be used to integrate and automate web traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic performance, SEO, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data have been set up, traffic monitoring information can be easily integrated with WordPress using a simple plugin used with other applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account and entering site data, you can use the details with traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed 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 plan to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your automated traffic generation system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your various social media and social bookmarking accounts 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 attract new traffic to your site.
You should have accounts set up with all the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can set up. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick those that will work with your system and/or content syndication tools.
(There are lots of social sites you can syndicate your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online technology platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your website.
There are various platforms you can incorporate into your own traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure your site.
Configuring WordPress For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
Global WordPress Settings
Your WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains an important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As described in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely configured your settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services box
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section lists only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of all the update services you want to notify as soon as you publish a new post to this section …
(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 your content gets seen by readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can have an influence traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could play a part in someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your site to view the rest of the content from summaries, 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 ticked or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to ping various update services whenever a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion Settings
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 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow your site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the ways your site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
To learn more about setting up WordPress permalinks, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring WordPress Traffic Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that can add just about every type of functionality to your website, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at 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 kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, securing your websites is something you simply cannot afford to ignore.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to hackers and bots.
To learn more, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving improving how search engines find, crawl and index your web pages …
(WordPress Plugin – Yoast SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines to find and index, it allows you to specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with WordPress 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 update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which visitors can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Configuring Settings – Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, some themes also provide built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your pages is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons to configure your settings and enable the function …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Other Important Features To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online (or plan to), it’s important that your website complies with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done.
(Does Your Site Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, see this article:
Post Categories And Tags
Post tags and categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your website.
(WordPress post categories help to improve your site’s SEO, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s tags and categories should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stages.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and post categories you have set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications find more of your website content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. Although search engines like Google will index your site just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – Don’t Lose Traffic!
When online visitors type in the wrong web address or click on an invalid hyperlink, they are presented with a 404 page …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
A 404 Error Page can redirect confused visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error page can be set up on your web server, there are several plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then is post web content on a consistent basis to start generating more web traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of different elements and web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The skills and expertise required to perform this phase of the traffic automation process can take many website professionals 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 our series.
This is the end of Part Three
To continue reading, click on the link below:
- Website Traffic Blueprint Part 4 – How To Create An Automated Traffic-Getting Machine With WordPress
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials aimed at helping business owners learn how to grow their business and drive traffic organically with a WordPress website and proven online marketing methods.
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