Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is post great content on a regular basis to attract more web traffic!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we look at the configuration stage of the traffic system. We will show you how to configure a WordPress site so you can attract web traffic automatically just by posting new content on your website.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by business owners as their greatest challenge online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive worldwide and are exploring any and every advantage they can to increase their competitiveness online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a huge advantage. Having an expertly configured WordPress site gives you an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
The Difference Is In The Configuration Process
There is a 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 one way to understand the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence and 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, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
Allow me to illustrate this point with an amusing little story.
A Semi-True Story …
All was going well in the widget assembly plant when all of a sudden, the machinery stopped.
No one could figure out what is wrong and so the plant manager decided to call in an expert.
Soon afterward, the expert arrived and immediately headed to the main control box. After staring at the box for no more than 5 minutes or so, the expert then took out a teeny-weeny little hammer and made a gentle tap near the right corner of the unit.
Immediately, everything in the workshop started working as before.
The floor manager was greatly overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager received a request for payment of $5,000.
The factory manager dialed the expert, demanding to know why the expert had charged them such a ludicrous fee for so little time delivering such minimal amount of work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrived on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, 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 gizmo factory stand to lose when production stopped working and no one on the factory floor had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have the right to ask to be compensated fairly for having invested years developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to quickly assess and repair a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your WordPress website or blog set up so all you ever had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other traffic-generating online 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 website?)
While many experts often make complicated solutions look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to work things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring basic settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install to add specific functionalities to your site.
- Which services need to be set up and activated to achieve desired results
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure to make sure things work as expected, etc.
(Driving 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 involved and complicated. The reason why is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring one or two plugins, clicking a button … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many different parts including your web server, your web site, and various external sites and services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If the activities involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart of the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these areas.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for site installation purposes. What we are talking about, is configuring settings in your web server that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web-hosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic your business can attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for good and unwelcome traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like implementing spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites.
Integration With External Web Properties
The basic concept of choosing external sites is that all of your content should be published from a central location (your site) and from there, syndicate automatically to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external services have been added to your configuration, content with links pointing back to your website gets automatically fed to these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social media accounts, even to users of the platform itself. Your business will receive added exposure online, helping your business tap into a whole new audience and traffic source.
Some of the sites and online platforms will need to be 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:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with important data, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site data with Google, your information can be used to automate traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s traffic results, SEO, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
After setting up your account, visitor tracking information can be added to all of your web pages in WordPress via any of several Google Analytics plugins used with other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account and site details have been set up, use your details to integrate and automate web traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers both a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you are planning to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your web traffic system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need your various social media and social bookmarking 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 drive new traffic to your site.
Set up profiles with all the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are loads 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 well with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(You can syndicate your content to loads of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online platforms and content aggregators that can act 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 that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your page.
There are various sites and platforms you can incorporate into your web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore some of these further and discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up third-party site accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
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.
WordPress – Global Settings
Your WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains an important and frequently overlooked traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Section)
As stated 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 ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services box
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is listed …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
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 takes care of 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 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 appears in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to view the rest of the content from excerpts, 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 in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Typically, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to instantly notify your update services list when new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(WordPress Settings – 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 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks Section)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your post permalinks …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
If you need help setting up WP permalinks, see this tutorial: Setting Up WordPress Permalinks
WordPress – Traffic Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality to your website, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to attract more visitors to your site
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No blog is immune from cyber-attacks.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to botnets and hackers.
More information:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your site more search engine friendly …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress Plugins For SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s search engine optimization. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines to index, it also lets you configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with their social networks can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you publish content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
There are many social sharing plugins available for WordPress users.
Many social plugins allow you to select which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress Traffic Theme Settings – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, some themes also give you built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site linking structure for faster indexing, easily add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons to your site is as easy as clicking a few buttons to configure your settings and enable the function …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Compliance Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online (or are planning to), you need to ensure that your site is compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article about adding compliance pages to WordPress here:
Post Categories & Tags
Categories & tags help search engines index your website, which improves traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s SEO.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s categories and tags should be set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
In the configuration phase, 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 and results.
Add A Site Map
A visitor site map that lists all of your site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications discover your online content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. HTML site maps are web pages that link to all other content on your site and provide visitors with a visual map of how your content is organized, while XML sitemaps are mostly code that only search engines can understand. Although Google will index your site 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 Error Page – Don’t Forget To Configure It!
When visitors searching online for your website type in the wrong web address or click on links pointing to destinations on your website that no longer exist, they are greeted with an error – page not found message (known as a 404 Not Found page) …
(A 404 Not Found error page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your web server, there are several WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your website has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you then need to do is post great content on a regular basis to automatically begin attracting more traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different components and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of skills and knowledge involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take some website developers months to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is explained in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive tutorial series designed to help you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively with a WordPress-powered website and proven web marketing methods.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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