Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated traffic generating machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically generate more traffic is publish content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we focused on critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to start 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 a WordPress website on your domain)
In this article, we will look at the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site so you can bring web traffic automatically simply by consistently publishing fresh content on your website.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Businesses are becoming ever more competitive and are researching any advantage they can to increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand is a huge advantage over other competitors. An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a flying start and an immediate advantage online.
The Difference Is In The Configuration Stage
There is a 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 its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to describe the difference:
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 process!)
Not only is more labor required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
Allow me to illustrate this point with a joke.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All is moving along in the widget-making assembly line when things grind to a sudden stop.
As no one can figure out what is wrong, the manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert walks immediately to the control box. After staring silently at the control unit for no more than 3 minutes or so, the expert then takes out a tiny little hammer and makes a gentle tap near the left corner of the unit.
Immediately, everything comes back to life.
The manager is overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the manager receives a request for payment of services rendered for $5,000.
Bewildered and angry, the manager calls the expert. Why did he charge them so much for so little time delivering such a minimal amount of work? He then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is driving visitors to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one on the factory floor had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to get paid fairly for having spent years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and repair a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress blog fully set up and configured so all you had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other traffic-generating web properties would be automatically 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 site?)
Although the solution to many challenges often seems quite simple once it’s been implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than simply installing a website and configuring a few basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins you need to install for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts you need to set up to achieve certain results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured in order to make sure things will function as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite involved. This is because it’s not as easy as installing a plugin, clicking a button … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of a number of different components such as your web hosting server, your website or blog, and a number of external sites …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart of the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine what’s involved in more detail.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for website installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about tweaking settings and options in your web hosting account specifically for handling web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic you can attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirections, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step is to configure a number of third-party sites and online services.
External Services
The basic concept of choosing external sites is that all content is published to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it then gets distributed automatically to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external platforms have been added to your traffic system, content linked back to your website will get automatically published on these platforms. Your content will be exposed to a new audience and source of traffic.
Some sites and services will need to be set up before configuring your settings to 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 settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Webmasters lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of essential information, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account with Google Webmasters have been set up, this information can be used with web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s results, SEO, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
After setting up your account and site details, you can add your account information to WordPress via a plugin and send data instantly to many other applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your Bing Webmaster Tools account and entering site data, you can use the account information with web traffic-related settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress provides users with a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to build a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your automated web traffic generation system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media Pages
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new traffic to your site)
You will need to have already set up your 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 pages and get new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts and profile pages with all the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick those that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary-level sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different user types.
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 social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your page.
There are various technologies and third-party applications you can add to your web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a configuration 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 site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
The WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains an important and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Section)
As described in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services field
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is listed …
(Update Services)
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 and WordPress takes care of the rest …
(You can 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 your content gets seen by visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your site 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.
As far as your traffic system is concerned, however, the most important setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Typically, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to instantly ping your update services list whenever new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion
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 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings Screen)
Here are some of the ways your permalink URLs can be configured …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
If you need help setting up permalinks in WordPress, refer to this tutorial: Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks
WP Plugin Settings
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality to your site, including traffic generation.
Let’s look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for handling 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, web security is something you cannot afford to ignore.
(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 botnets.
Go here for more details:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web pages easy for search engines like Google and Bing to index …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO Plugin)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google to find, crawl and index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with others online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you publish content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with WordPress plugins)
There are many social sharing plugins available for WordPress.
Many social share plugins let you specify which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WordPress Theme Settings
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 design and layout of your site, some themes also provide options for improving SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With many themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your website is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic Configuration – Additional Features
Last but not least in the traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of business online, it’s important that your site is found to comply with government regulations.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
To learn more about why it’s important to have a legally compliant website, see this article:
Tags And Categories
Post tags & categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your web pages.
(Post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search engine optimization.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your site’s post tags and post categories during the Website Planning Phase.
When configuring your site to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the tags and categories that have been set up.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A visitor site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications find more of your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although Google can 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 Forget This!
When visitors searching for your site type in the wrong web address or click on a hyperlink pointing to a page on your site that no longer exists, they are presented with a 404 error page …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(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 WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do is add fresh content on a consistent basis to automatically start attracting web 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 web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of skills and knowledge required to perform this process typically takes some website developers months to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as you can. This step is covered in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read more, click here:
- Website Traffic Blueprint Part 4 – How To Increase Your Web Traffic For Your Business With WordPress
This article is part of an tutorial series aimed at helping small business owners learn how to grow their business using a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven web marketing strategies.
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