Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this article series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is post new content on a regular basis to generate traffic!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase of the blueprint. We explained the best way to get started 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 how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we will discuss the configuration phase of the traffic automation process. We will show you how a WordPress site should be configured to automatically bring visitors whenever you post new content on your site.
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Configuration
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as their greatest challenge online. Businesses are becoming ever more competitive and are looking for every advantage they believe will improve their performance and results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge advantage over the competition. For WordPress users, an expertly configured website means having a significant advantage from the very beginning.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to explain the differences:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only are more steps required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
Let me illustrate this with a joke.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
All was going just fine in the widget-making plant when things ground to a sudden stop.
As no one could figure out what went wrong, the manager decided to call in an expert.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrived and immediately headed towards the main control box. After staring silently at the wires and circuitry for no more than 3 minutes, the expert then took out a little hammer from his utility belt and made a single tap about 1 inch from the left-hand edge of the unit.
Immediately, everything sprang back to life.
The plant manager was relieved as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the manager received an invoice for the amount of $5,000.
The manager dialed the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged so much for less than five minutes work and promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice notice 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 web traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one on the business had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for having spent years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress site set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and search engines, social media and dozens of other traffic-generating online 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 attracting new visitors to your site?)
Although experts often make complicated things look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than just installing a website and configuring a few internal settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install to get various functionalities on your site.
- Which third-party services you need to set up to get desired results
- Which settings need to be configured in order to make sure things function how you have envisioned, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically difficult, but it’s quite complicated. It’s not just about installing and configuring one or two plugins, configuring some options and settings in your admin area or clicking a button … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration phase involves the integration of different parts including your server, your site, and a number of external sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we create a simple diagram showing all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at these steps.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your hosting account for website installation purposes. What we are talking about, is configuring settings in your web hosting account specifically for handling web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your business will attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirections, etc?)
After fine-tuning your server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites and online services.
Configuring External Web Properties
The concept behind adding external sites is that all of your content is posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it gets automatically distributed to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external services have been added to your traffic system, content linking back to your website gets automatically added to search, social and aggregator sites. Your content will be exposed to a new audience and source of traffic.
Some sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your settings to help save time 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 Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with a range of important data, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account with Google Webmasters have been set up, use the details to automate traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account, traffic tracking information can be added to all of your pages in WordPress via plugins and and sent to other useful applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. After setting up your account and entering site details with Bing, you can use this information to integrate and automate traffic settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers both a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your web traffic system in Part Four of this article series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and bring new traffic to your site)
You will need to have already set up your social media 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 and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have accounts and profiles set up with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just select the ones that will work with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(There are many social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different users.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your social feed.
There are many different technologies and third-party applications that can be added to your web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore some of these further and 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 WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Web Site 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 key areas.
WordPress Settings
By default, all WordPress installations include a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Sections 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 area contains an important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have intentionally configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services field
By default, this section contains only one entry …
(WordPress Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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 influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website to view 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.
Generally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to instantly notify all the update services you have specified in the Update Services area whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
Discussion
Although discussion settings 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings enable your site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the ways search-friendly URLS can be configured …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
To learn more about setting up WordPress permalinks, refer to this tutorial: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including traffic generation.
Let’s look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the kind 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 web security.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to hackers and botnets.
To learn more, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your website more search engine friendly …
(SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find, classify and index, it also lets you specify how to present your content in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using free or inexpensive plugins.
Many social share plugins allow you to 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 plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site 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 traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, some themes also give you built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing features to your pages is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Other Areas To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the configuration process, are the components that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website 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 things that can go wrong as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you do any kind of business online (or are planning to), it’s important that your site remains compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Compliant?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, go here:
WordPress Post Categories & Tags
Post tags and categories help to improve your site’s search optimization, which helps to increase traffic.
(Categories help to improve your site’s SEO, which improves traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your website’s post tags and post categories should be discussed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
When looking at ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories that have been set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A visitor site map that lists all of your posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications find your online 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 two different things. Only search engines can interpret XML sitemaps. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – Don’t Forget To Configure It!
When online visitors type in the wrong URL or click on a link pointing to an incorrect destination on your site, they will typically be presented with an error – page not found message (known as a 404 page) …
(A 404 Not Found page)
A 404 Error Page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up in your web server, there are several plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your site has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do is publish web content on a consistent basis to automatically generate more traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many web developers a long time to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is addressed in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Part 3
To continue reading this article, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive tutorial series aimed at helping small business owners learn how to grow their business using a WordPress website and proven web marketing methods.
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