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 WordPress.
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 traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to automatically start driving traffic is post new content consistently!)
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 website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we discuss the configuration phase of the WordPress traffic automation system. We will explain what makes an expertly configured site different from a professionally configured website, and how much work is required to ensure that when all is set up and configured, you will bring new visitors automatically as you begin publishing web content to your site.
WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Also, the business landscape is becoming ever more competitive and businesses are looking for every advantage they can that can help you improve their results and performance online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous competitive advantage. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website means having a significant advantage from the very beginning.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here is a simple way to describe the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and 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 type of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this here’s a little story.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
Things are going well in the gizmo-making workshop when all of a sudden, everything comes to a stop.
No one can figure out what’s gone wrong and so the floor manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert heads out directly to the main control box. After staring silently at the control unit for 2 minutes, the expert then produces a little hammer and makes a very gentle tap near the left corner of the control unit.
Immediately, everything springs back to life.
The plant manager is greatly overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager receives an invoice for the sum of $5,000.
Feeling angry, the manager dials the expert. Demanding to know why the expert has charged them so much for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work, he then requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives in the manager’s intray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive traffic to their sites.
How much money did the factory stand to lose when the equipment stopped working and no one in the factory floor was able to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to be compensated fairly for spending years building up the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to assess and fix a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your site fully set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and search engines, social sites and dozens of other traffic-generating web properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
While the solution to many challenges often seems quite easy once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than simply installing a website and configuring basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which third-party accounts you need to set up to get certain results
- Which settings you need to configure to make sure everything will function as expected, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this part of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically difficult, it can be quite involved and time-consuming. The reason why is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring a plugin, tweaking some options and settings in your dashboard area or clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a process that involves your web server, your website, and various third-party sites and online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified diagram of the configuration process)
Let’s take a brief look at what’s involved.
Your Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for website installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings in your server specifically for handling all 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 positive traffic. Some of the traffic your website will attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like integrating server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
After your server settings have been fine-tuned and configured, the next step is to configure various external sites.
External Sites & Accounts – Configuration
The concept behind choosing external sites is that all content should be published from one central location (your site) and from there, get automatically distributed to other components of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external sites have been added to your system, content linking 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 source of traffic.
Some sites and services will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress site to help speed up the configuration process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmasters)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of important data, tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account with Google Search Console, you can use this information with 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 traffic performance, SEO, marketing campaigns, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data have been set up, traffic tracking data can be integrated with WordPress via a plugin used with other applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your account and site data have been set up, you can use your information to integrate and automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress provides users with a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to grow a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. 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 Four of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and bring new traffic 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 and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have profiles set up with all the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can You can post your content to many social sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just select the ones that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online technology platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your social feed.
There are various sites and platforms that can be incorporated into your own web traffic system. Please feel free to 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 external service accounts, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress 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.
Global Settings
By default, your WordPress admin area includes a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As described below the Update Services section title,
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, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services text area
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is available …
(WordPress Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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 in this section can have an influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up 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 blog 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 main setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Typically, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to instantly ping all the update services you have listed in the Update Services box whenever new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion Settings
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 blogs 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 Section)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings Screen)
Here are some of the ways permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring post permalinks)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, see this step-by-step tutorial: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add just about every kind of functionality to your website, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief 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 website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the kind 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 web security.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and botnets.
Go here to learn more:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web content easily indexable …
(Yoast SEO – WP Plugins For SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to find, classify and index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with their social networks can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
There are many free or inexpensive social sharing plugins to choose from.
Most social sharing plugins let you 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 likes), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to protect content which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WP 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 the layout and design of your site, some themes also give you built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your site is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features)
Additional Configuration Areas For WordPress
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic system configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with good and unwanted traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to your business as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you make money online, it’s important that your website remains compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Compliant?)
We have written a detailed article on the importance of having a legally compliant website here:
Post Categories And Post Tags
WordPress categories and tags help search engines classify and index your web pages, which helps to increase traffic.
(Categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search engine optimization.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s post categories and tags should be discussed and set up during the Website Planning Stage.
When considering ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post categories and tags you have set up.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications find more of your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. Although Google will index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – Don’t Forget To Configure This Too!
When visitors enter the wrong URL or click on a link pointing to a page on your website that no longer exists, they will normally be greeted with an error – page not found message (known as a 404 page) …
(A 404 Not Found page)
A 404 Not Found page can redirect confused visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up in your server, there are several WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then is post great content on a regular basis to drive more traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of various components and web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise required to perform this process can take many website professionals months to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is addressed in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Section 3
To keep reading about this topic, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of articles designed to help you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively and drive traffic organically with a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven marketing methods that are easy to implement.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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