Welcome to Part Three of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is post great content regularly to begin attracting more traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of the blueprint. We helped you understand 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 website, and what to do if your website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will look at the configuration stage of this process. We will explain what makes an expertly configured WordPress site different, and how much work is required to ensure that when everything is fully set up and configured, you will bring new traffic automatically as you begin to post new content on a consistent basis to your website.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With business getting increasingly more competitive worldwide, it’s worth learning about every opportunity you can to improve your own performance and results online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge advantage over the competition. For WordPress users, an expertly configured website allows their business to get off with a flying start as soon as their website is launched.
The Configuration Phase Is What Makes The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here’s one way to explain the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only are more steps required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this point here’s a story.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
All is moving along in the widget manufacturing plant when things suddenly grinds to a stop.
As no one can figure out what’s wrong, the manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
The expert arrives shortly afterwards and, without uttering a word, walks directly towards the control box. After staring silently at the wires and circuitry for about 3 minutes or less, the expert then produces a little hammer from his utility belt and makes a gentle tap near the top-left corner of the unit.
Immediately, everything comes back to life.
The plant manager is filled with joy as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives an invoice for $5,000.
Confused and outraged, the manager calls the expert. Demanding to know why they have been charged so much for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice arrives in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic consistently 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 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 years spent developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to avert a serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WordPress website or blog set up so all you have to do is publish content to it and search engines, social sites like Facebook and Twitter and dozens of other online properties would be immediately 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 driving traffic to your site?)
Although experts often make complicated solutions look easy, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than installing a website and configuring basic settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which plugins need to be installed to add certain functionalities to your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts you need to set up to achieve specific outcomes
- Which options you need to configure to make sure everything will function as expected, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This part of the traffic automation system is not so technically difficult, but it’s quite involved. The reason why is because it’s not just about installing and configuring a piece of software, tweaking some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration phase is a complex process that involves your web server, your website, and a number of external sites and/or online services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we create a simple diagram showing the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified flowchart of the configuration phase)
Let’s take a better look at these areas.
Your Server – Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your hosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about tweaking settings and options in your web server that affect how you will handle all 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 positive traffic. Some of the traffic your website can attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like integrating spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After your server settings have been checked and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites.
External Sites
The purpose of choosing external sites is that all of your content is posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it then gets automatically distributed to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you add these external sites to your network, content linking back to your website gets automatically published on these platforms. Your site will then be given exposure to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of these third-party sites 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 before configuring your site’s settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with useful information, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site details, the details can be used with 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 website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, you can add tracking code to all of your web pages in WordPress via a simple plugin and send data instantly to other applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account with Bing Webmaster Tools, the information can be used to automate traffic-related settings 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 the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to build a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your web traffic generation system in Part Four of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need your various social accounts set up 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 get new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts and profiles with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can You can syndicate your content to lots of social sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we discuss some of these tools in more detail further below and during the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to loads of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
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 visitors can follow your RebelMouse website.
There are various solutions that can be added to your web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
Your WordPress admin area contains a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most powerful and often overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Screen)
As described in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally chosen 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 section
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section displays only one entry …
(Writing Settings – WordPress Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress – just add a list containing all of the update services you want notified 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
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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
This section affects how visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could play a part in someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to read the rest of the content from a partial feed, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The main setting in this section as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to instantly notify all the update services you have listed whenever new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
To learn more about setting up WordPress permalinks, refer to this step-by-step tutorial: Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks
Configuring Settings – WordPress Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality to your site, including traffic generation.
Let’s 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 site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No website or blog is guaranteed immunity from being attacked by hackers.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent 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.
To learn more, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines 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. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website with WordPress plugins)
There are loads of free or inexpensive social sharing plugins to choose from.
Most social sharing plugins allow you to select which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which users can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress Theme Settings – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, many themes also provide options for improving SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes include built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing features to your site is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Configuring Other WordPress Areas
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic system configuration process, are the elements that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and unwelcome traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to your business when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you make money online (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your site is found to comply with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Compliant?)
We have written a detailed article about how to quickly add legal pages to your WordPress site here:
Post Tags And Post Categories
Categories & post tags help search engines index your web pages, which helps to increase traffic.
(Categories help to improve your site’s SEO, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s post categories and tags should be set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
When looking at ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and categories have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools discover your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. Although search engines like Google can 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.
Your WordPress 404 Page Not Found
When online visitors enter the wrong URL or click on a hyperlink pointing to an incorrect destination on your website, they are presented with a 404 Not Found error page …
(A 404 Not Found error page)
A 404 Not Found error page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found 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 from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do to automatically attract new web traffic is add fresh content on a consistent basis.
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 …
(WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The skills and expertise required to perform this phase of the traffic automation process typically takes some web developers months to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is explained in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This article is part of an article series aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively and drive traffic organically with a WordPress-driven website and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
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