Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this article series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is publish content on a regular basis to automatically begin bringing new web traffic!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase of the automation process. 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 website, and what to do if your website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we will look at the configuration phase of the WordPress traffic automation system. You will learn how a WordPress site should be configured in order to automatically begin to get traffic whenever you add new content to your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Also, the business landscape is becoming increasingly more competitive on a global scale and businesses are exploring any and every opportunity they can to get better results online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous advantage over other competitors. For business owners, having an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start as soon as their website is launched.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
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 builder but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to understand the key difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional 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, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
Allow me to illustrate this with an amusing anecdote.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
All was going well in the gizmo manufacturing plant when suddenly, things ceased working.
No one could figure out what is wrong and so the floor manager decided to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert headed immediately towards the control box. After staring at the wiring board for 5 minutes, the expert then produced a tiny hammer from his shirt pocket and made a gentle tap near the bottom-right corner of the unit.
Immediately, everything started working once more.
The manager was overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager received an invoice for $5,000.
The manager called the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged such a ludicrous fee for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of 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 visitors to their sites.
How much money did the plant stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the business had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have every right to ask to be compensated fairly for having spent years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to assess and avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WP site configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube 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 attracting new visitors to your site?)
While experts often make complicated things look easy, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than just installing a website and configuring a few settings. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which services you need to set up to achieve certain outcomes
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured to make sure things work as you have imagined, etc.
(Generating new 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 difficult, it can be quite complicated. This is because it’s not just about installing and configuring a piece of software, configuring some settings in your dashboard area or clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration phase involves the integration of many different parts including your web server, your website, and a number of external sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If we try to flowchart the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified flowchart of the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these steps.
Your Server – Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for website installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is configuring settings in your web server that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, 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 traffic you will attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for both good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites.
External Accounts
The concept behind adding external sites is that all content gets published to one central location (your site) and from there, it gets distributed automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After incorporating these external sites into your setup, content linking back to your site is automatically fed to these platforms, indexed by search engines and distributed to social media sites, even to users of the platform itself. Your content and site will be exposed to a new audience and source of traffic.
Some web properties and online services will need to be set up before configuring your site to help save time and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts before configuring your WordPress site’s settings:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of useful information, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your account with Google Search Console are set up, the information can be used with 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, user engagement, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account and site details, you can add traffic monitoring code to WordPress via a simple plugin and send data instantly to other applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your account and site data with Bing are set up, this information can be used with traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress provides users with a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your automated traffic system in Part Four of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site)
You will need your social media 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 sites and bring new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have set up accounts and profile pages with all the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can You can syndicate your content to loads of social sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose the ones that will work well with your system and/or content syndication tools (we will look at some of these tools in more detail in the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to loads of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different user types.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add an RSS feed from your WordPress blog …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
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 website.
There are many different technologies and third-party applications you can add 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 plan to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure WordPress.
Configuring Your WordPress Site
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global Settings
Your WordPress admin area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains an important and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – 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, then your site will automatically ping the list of services entered into the Update Services section
By default, this section displays only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress – just add a list of update services 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 Settings
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 text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website or 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 main setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Typically, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to automatically ping 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, leave this box unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Section)
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 content, 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 Screen)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks enable WordPress to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
Here are some of the options for configuring your search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring permalinks)
For a detailed tutorial about setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks
Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add just about every type of functionality to your site, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Let’s look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to attract more visitors to your site
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 simply cannot ignore the importance of securing your web site.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and bots.
Go here to learn more:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving improving how search engines like Google find and index your website …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress Plugins For SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines to find, classify and index, it allows you to specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with others can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Most social sharing plugins allow you to specify which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your site which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring Settings – Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring layout and design aspects of your website, some themes also provide options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for faster indexing, easily add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a free theme) have built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your pages is as easy as clicking a few buttons and enabling the feature …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Additional Areas To Configure For Better Traffic
Last but not least in the configuration process, are the elements that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and bad traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you do any kind of business online (or are planning to), you need to ensure that your website remains compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business online.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?)
We have created a detailed article on adding legal pages to WordPress here:
Post Categories & Tags
Categories and post tags help improve traffic by improving your site’s search engine optimization.
(WordPress categories help search engines index your pages, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s post categories and tags should be discussed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stages.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the categories and tags that have been set up.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A site map that lists all of your site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites find your web content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Page – A Source Of Lost Traffic Opportunities!
When visitors searching for your website enter the wrong URL or click on an invalid hyperlink, they will typically be presented with a 404 Not Found error page …
(A 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up in your web server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your website has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then is post web content on a regular basis to automatically start generating more traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of different elements and web properties …
(WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration process typically takes some website professionals a long time to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is explained in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 3
To keep reading this article, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive tutorial series designed to help you learn how to grow your business online and drive traffic sustainably using a WordPress-driven website and proven marketing strategies that are easy to implement.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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