Welcome to Part Three of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this series, we described 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 to automatically begin attracting more traffic is post content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we discussed critical setup decisions. 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 site, and what to do if your existing site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we will discuss the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. You will learn how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that traffic will automatically start flowing whenever you add content on your web site.
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Configuration
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With competition making business survival increasingly more difficult businesses are exploring any and every advantage they believe will help them get better results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a huge advantage over the competition. With an expertly configured WordPress site, your business has an immediate advantage from the very beginning.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
There is a 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 a simple way to explain the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does it take extra labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
Everything was moving along in the gizmo assembly line when the machines suddenly came to a halt.
No one could figure out what has happened and so the manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
The expert arrived shortly after being summoned and, without saying a word, immediately headed towards the main control box. After staring at the circuit board for about 5 minutes, the expert then took out a teensy-weensy little hammer from his tool belt and made a gentle tap about 1 cm from the left corner of the box.
Immediately, everything returned once again to normal.
The manager was delighted as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager received a service bill for $5,000.
The factory manager picked up the phone and dialled the expert, demanding to know why they were expected to pay such a ridiculously high fee for so little time spent delivering such minimal amount of work and promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrived in the manager’s intray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is driving visitors to their sites.
How much money did the factory stand to lose when production stopped working and no one in the factory floor had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to get paid fairly for having invested years developing the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to quickly avert a serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your web site set up so all you had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other online properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
While the solution to many problems is often quite easy in hindsight, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring basic settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed to add desired functionalities to your site.
- Which 3rd-party services you need to set up to achieve certain outcomes
- Which settings need to be configured to ensure that things work to plan, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the WordPress traffic automation system is not so technically challenging, but it’s quite involved. The reason why is because it’s not as simple as installing one or two plugins, clicking a button … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration stage is a complex process that involves your web hosting server, your website or blog, and various external sites and online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If the activities involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine what’s involved in more detail.
Web Server Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for website installation purposes. What we are talking about, is tweaking settings in your server that affect how your website will handle all web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your server 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 may attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like configuring spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of external sites and/or online services.
External Web Properties & Solutions – Configuration
The basic concept of adding external sites is that all of your content should be published from one central location (your site) and from there, get automatically distributed to other parts of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After adding these external platforms to your traffic system, content pointing back to your site will get automatically posted to these platforms. Your site will receive added exposure online, helping your business tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of the sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site’s 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 WordPress site:
Google Webmasters
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmasters lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of important information, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your account and site data have been set up, your information can be used to automate traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
After setting up your Once you have set up your Google Analytics account, you can add traffic monitoring code to WordPress using plugins and feed data instantly to other online applications and web properties.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account and site data with Bing are set up, your account information can be used with traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers users the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your automated traffic generation system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your various social accounts in order to integrate these with 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 traffic to your site.
You should set up profiles with all the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can You can post your content to lots of social bookmarking sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just select those that will work with your system and/or content sharing tools (we will cover some of these tools in greater detail in the Automation phase).
(There are many social sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online web platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary-level sources of traffic. 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 lets you add a feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute your content to social networks)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your page.
There are various sites and platforms you can incorporate into your traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains an important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Screen)
As described below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have intentionally configured your site settings 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
By default, 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 of all the update services you want to notify as soon as you publish a new post to this section …
(Notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress!)
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 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 text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your 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.
The most important setting in this section as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to automatically ping all the update services you have listed when new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, leave this box unchecked …
(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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings enable WordPress to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the ways SEO-friendly URLs can be configured …
(Configuring permalinks)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, go here: Changing WordPress Permalinks
WordPress Traffic Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality to your website, including 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 dealing with 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 website.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to attacks from hackers and bots.
Go here for more details:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your website more search engine friendly)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your website’s SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index, it also lets you specify how to present your content in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with their social networks can help boost traffic to your site, especially if your site provides content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social features to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using WordPress plugins.
Many social sharing plugins allow you to select which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which users can unlock by sharing your page.
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, many themes also give you built-in features that let you improve SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing features to your site is as easy as clicking a few buttons to configure your settings and enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic Configuration – Additional Sections
Last (but by no means least) in the traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online, it’s important that your site remains compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate online business practices.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?)
If you need help understanding the importance of having a compliant website, refer to this article:
Categories And Post Tags
Tags & categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better organize and index your web pages.
(Categories help to improve your site’s search optimization, which improves traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s tags and categories should be reviewed and set up during the Website Planning Stage.
When considering ways to automate and improve 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 is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications discover your site’s content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. Although Google will index your site just from 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 results in increased traffic.
Your 404 Page
When visitors searching online for your website enter the wrong web address into their browser or click on an invalid hyperlink, they are greeted with a 404 error page …
(A WordPress 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect web 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 Not Found error page can be set up in your web server, there are several WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do is post great content on a consistent basis to automatically start driving 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 Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of skills and knowledge required to perform the configuration phase of the traffic automation 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 aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is covered in the next section of our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help small business owners learn how to grow their business with a WordPress-powered website and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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