Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated web traffic generating machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to begin attracting more web traffic is post fresh content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase. 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 site, and what to do if your site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we discuss the configuration stage of the traffic system. We will show you how a WordPress site should be configured in order to automatically begin to get new traffic simply by posting new content on your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration Phase
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Businesses are becoming increasingly more competitive worldwide and are exploring any and every opportunity they can to increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous advantage. With an expertly configured WordPress site, you have an immediate advantage from the word “go”.
The Configuration Stage Is What Makes The Difference
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 developer but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s a simple way to explain the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
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.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
Things were going well in the widget assembly workshop when everything came to a sudden stop.
As no one could figure out what was wrong, the plant manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrived and headed out immediately to the control box. After staring at the board for no more than 2 minutes, the expert then took out a teeny-weeny hammer and made a single tap about 1 inch from the right-hand corner of the box.
Immediately, everything in the plant came back to life.
The plant manager was delighted as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the manager received an invoice for the sum of $5,000.
The manager called the expert, demanding to know why they were expected to pay such an exorbitant fee for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of work and promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice arrived on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is driving web traffic to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when the equipment stopped working and no one on the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have every right to ask to be compensated fairly for having invested years building up the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to immediately avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a WP website fully set up and configured so all you had to do is publish new content and search engines, social media and dozens of other 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 attracting new visitors to your site?)
While the solution to many problems is often ridiculously simple once it’s been implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring basic settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up and activate to get certain outcomes
- Which options you need to configure to ensure that things function as expected, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite complicated. This is because it’s not just about installing a solution, configuring some settings in your admin area or clicking on a button or two … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration phase involves the integration of a number of different parts such as your server, your site, and various third-party sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the configuration process)
Let’s examine what’s involved in more detail.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your hosting account for site installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your web server specifically for handling web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your web-hosting account settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic you can attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like configuring spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and services.
External Web Properties And Solutions – Configuration
The concept behind setting up external sites is that all content gets posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it radiates outwards automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After adding these external services to your configuration, content linking back to your site will be automatically posted to these platforms. Your content and site will receive increased exposure online, helping you tap into new sources of traffic.
Some of these sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site 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:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of important information, SEO tools and reports about your website.
Once your account and site details with Google have been set up, this information can be used with web traffic settings in WordPress 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, search engine and social media referrers, etc.
After setting up your up your Google Analytics account and site details has been entered, you can add traffic monitoring code to WordPress via a Google Analytics plugin and feed data automatically to other applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account and site data are set up, use your information to automate traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers website owners a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to grow a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, 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 this into your automated web traffic system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social accounts set up in order to 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 and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site.
You should have pages set up with all the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can You can post your content to loads of social bookmarking sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content syndication tools (we will look at some of these tools in more detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to lots of social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many 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.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your RebelMouse page.
There are many different platforms that can be incorporated into your web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with third-party services, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
Configuring Your WordPress Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Section)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services text box
By default, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
You can 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 Settings
This section affects how your content gets seen by visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can have an influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could play a part in someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your site to get the rest of the content from a partial feed, 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 in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is ticked or not.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to notify the list of update services when a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Section)
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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow your site to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks Screen)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your permalinks …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
We have written a detailed tutorial about using permalinks in WordPress here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring Settings – WP Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add almost every type of functionality to your site, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Let’s look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to bring more visitors to your site
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your site 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 simply cannot afford to ignore the importance of securing your website.
(Security Plugins help prevent 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.
For more information, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web content easy for search engines like Google to index …
(WordPress SEO plugins help increase traffic by making your site more search engine friendly)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to find and index, it also lets you specify how to present your content to Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social plugins allow you to 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 likes), etc. Some plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which users can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress – Traffic Generation Theme Features
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring layout and design elements of your website, some themes also provide built-in options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes allow you to configure options and settings for better traffic results)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your pages is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic System – Additional Configuration Steps
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic blueprint configuration process, are the components that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic, 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 find and begin to visit your website.
If you make money online, it’s important that your site is compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
We have written a detailed article about adding compliance pages to WordPress here:
WordPress Post Categories & Tags
Tags and categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better organize and index your website.
(Categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your pages.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to discuss and set up your website’s post tags and categories during the Website Planning Process.
When configuring your website to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and post categories that have been set up.
Add A Site Map
A site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools find more of your site’s content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin 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.
Your Site’s 404 Error Page
When visitors type in the wrong URL or click on hyperlinks pointing to an incorrect destination on your website, they will normally be greeted with an error page …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your website has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do is publish great content consistently to begin bringing traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of various components and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration phase of the traffic automation process can take many web professionals a long time to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is explained in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section 3
To keep reading this article, click here:
This article is part of an article series aimed at helping site owners learn how to grow their business using a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven marketing strategies 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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