Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this article series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is post great content consistently to automatically attract web traffic!)
In Part 2, we looked at critical setup decisions. We helped you understand 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 site, and what to do if your site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration stage of the traffic system. We will show you how to configure a WordPress site so you can automatically begin attracting visitors whenever you publish fresh content to your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. Businesses are becoming increasingly more competitive worldwide and are exploring every advantage available to get better results online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand is a tremendous competitive advantage. An expertly configured WordPress site gives you an immediate advantage from the very start.
The Configuration Stage Is What Makes 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’s one way to describe the difference:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special type of expertise.
To illustrate this here’s a joke.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
Things are running smoothly in the widget-making plant when production suddenly stops.
As no one can figure out what is wrong, the floor manager decides to call in an expert.
Promptly after arriving, the expert heads directly towards the main control box. After staring at the wires and circuitry for 5 minutes or so, the expert then produces a tiny hammer from his tool belt and makes a gentle tap near the right corner of the control unit.
Immediately, everything springs back to life.
The manager is delighted as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager receives a request of payment for services for the amount of $5,000.
Feeling furious, the manager dials the expert. Demanding to know why they were charged so much for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrives and is placed in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the widget plant stand to lose when the equipment stopped functioning and no one in the business had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have every right to get paid fairly for spending years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to quickly assess and avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress website or blog fully set up and configured so all you have to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest 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 website?)
While experts often make difficult solutions look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to work things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than just installing a website and configuring settings for clients. It also requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install to add desired functionalities to your site.
- Which 3rd-party services need to be set up and activated to get desired outcomes
- Which options you need to configure to make sure things will function to plan, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite involved and complicated. It’s not as easy as installing one or two plugins, tweaking some options and settings in your admin area or clicking a button … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of many parts such as your server, your web site, and a number of external sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website 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 simplistic diagram showing the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a better look at what’s involved.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for site installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your server specifically for handling web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web 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 website may attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for both good and bad traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like implementing server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up 404 error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
Once your server settings have been checked and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of third-party sites.
External Web Properties & Solutions – Configuration
The concept behind choosing external sites is that all content will get posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it will be automatically distributed to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After incorporating these external platforms into your traffic network, content with links pointing back to your website will get automatically published on search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and site will be exposed to a new audience and new sources of traffic.
Some of the sites and services will need to be set up before configuring your site to help 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:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmasters)
Google Webmasters lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with essential information, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site details, you can use this information with web traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s results, SEO, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, traffic monitoring information can be easily integrated with WordPress via any of several Google Analytics plugins and automatically fed to other useful applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your account and site data with Bing have been set up, the details can be used with web traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers users a hosted and a self-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 can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your automated traffic generation system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and attract new traffic to your site)
You will need to have already set up your social media accounts before you can integrate these with 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 drive new visitors to your site.
Set up profiles with all the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can You can post your content to lots of social bookmarking sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose those that will work with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online web platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add a feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute social content to social networks)
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 social feed.
There are various platforms that can be incorporated into your own web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore this area further and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring WordPress Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(Global Settings – 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 purposely configured your settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the list of services entered into the Update Services field
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is listed …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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, choosing to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s choice to explore your content 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 most important setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to instantly notify various update services when a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, leave this box unchecked …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion Settings
Although this section is 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings enable your site to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring permalinks)
To learn more about setting up permalinks in WordPress, refer to this step-by-step tutorial: Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks
Configuring Settings – WP Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add almost every type of functionality to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you cannot ignore the importance of securing your web sites.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to botnets and hackers.
More information:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your site more search engine friendly)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to index, it also gives you control over how your content is presented in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins to choose from.
Many social sharing plugins allow you to select 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 followers), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which visitors can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring design and layout aspects of your site, some themes also provide built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes allow you to configure settings and options for better traffic results)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your website is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Configuring Additional Areas Of WordPress For Improved Traffic Flow
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Compliance Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in visitor 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 hurt your business when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you do business online (or are planning to), it’s important that your website is found to comply with all legal requirements.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Compliant?)
To learn more about how to quickly and easily add legal pages to your WordPress site, go here:
WordPress Post Tags & Post Categories
Post tags and categories help to improve your site’s SEO, which improves traffic.
(WordPress post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better classify and index your pages.)
As we recommend in this article, your website’s categories and tags should be reviewed and set up during the Website Planning Phase.
When looking at ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and post categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal benefits and results.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools discover more of 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 things. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, while an XML sitemap is mostly code that only search engines can read. Although Google will index your pages just from 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 can result in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – An Additional Source Of Traffic!
When online users type in the wrong web address into their web browser or click on a hyperlink pointing to a page on your site that no longer exists, they are greeted with an error page (known as a 404 Not Found page) …
(A WordPress 404 Error 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 server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your site has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you then need to do is post fresh content on a regular basis to automatically generate traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of various elements and web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise required to perform this phase of the traffic automation process typically takes many website developers a long time to learn.
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 Three
To read more, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive article series designed to help small business owners learn how to grow their business online using a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven online marketing methods.
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