Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to automatically generate more web traffic is add web content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase of the blueprint. We explained the best way to get started 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 website was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this article, we look at the configuration phase of the traffic blueprint. We will show you how a WordPress site should be configured in order to ensure that traffic will automatically start flowing as you begin to publish fresh content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business getting so much more competitive, it’s worth learning about every advantage that can help you increase your own competitiveness online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous advantage over other competitors. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website means having an immediate advantage from the very start.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to describe the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only is more work required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special kind of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with a story.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
Things are going well in the widget assembly line when everything suddenly stops.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the floor manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert immediately walks to the main control box. After staring at the schematics for 2 minutes or so, the expert then produces a tiny hammer from his tool box and makes a very gentle tap about two and half cm from the left side of the unit.
Immediately, everything comes back to life.
The plant manager is grateful and relieved as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the manager receives a bill for $5,000.
Bordering on outrage, the manager rings the expert. Demanding to know why they have been charged so much for less than five minutes work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive web traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the business was able to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have every right to demand fair compensation for investing years developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly assess and avert a serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a site set up so all you have to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other web properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your website?)
While the solution to many problems often seems quite simple in hindsight, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to work things out.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than just installing a website and configuring basic settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which services need to be set up and activated to achieve specific results
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure to ensure that everything works how you expect, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the traffic automation system may not seem so technically difficult, it can be quite complicated. It’s not as simple as installing and configuring a solution, clicking a button … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a process that involves your server, your site, and a number of third-party sites …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified diagram showing the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these steps.
Configuring Your Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for website installation purposes. What we are talking about, is configuring settings and options in your server that affect how you will handle all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your site may attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of third-party sites.
External Services
The purpose of setting up external sites is that all of your content should be posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, be distributed automatically to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After adding these external platforms to your configuration, content pointing back to your site gets automatically fed to search, social and aggregator accounts. Your site will receive exposure online, helping you tap into new sources of traffic.
Some of the third-party sites and online solutions will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress settings to save time and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of important information, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your account and entering site data with Google Webmasters, use the information to automate web traffic settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) 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 engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrers, etc.
After setting up your Once you have set up your Google Analytics account, you can add tracking code to WordPress using plugins and feed data automatically to many other online applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account is set up, your account information can be used with web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers website owners a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your traffic system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need to set up your various social media and social bookmarking accounts before you can configure these as part of 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 bring new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have accounts and profiles set up with all of the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick those that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we discuss some of these tools in more detail in the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to lots of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online web platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different user types.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add a feed from your WordPress site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your website.
There are many different solutions that can be incorporated into your web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore some of these and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external services, 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 its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
Your WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area 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 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 settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of services entered into the Update Services text area
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section includes only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(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 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 traffic. For example, your choice of displaying 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 website or blog to read 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 traffic is concerned, however, the most important setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to instantly ping all the update services you have specified in the Update Services area whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion
Although this section is 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 Section)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks Section)
Here are some of the ways site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
To learn more about setting up WP permalinks, refer to this step-by-step tutorial: How To Change Your WordPress Permalinks
WordPress – Traffic Generation Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality to your website, including traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is safe from cyber-attacks.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and botnets.
To learn more, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving improving the way search engines like Google find and index your web pages …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO Plugin)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find, crawl and index, it also gives you control over how your content is presented to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using WordPress plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins to choose from.
Many social share plugins let you select which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which users can unlock by sharing your page.
WordPress Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as 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 navigation structure for faster indexing, add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your site is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons and enabling the function …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Configuring Other WordPress Settings
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic system configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Compliance Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for both good and unwelcome traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of business online, you need to make sure that your site stays compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Site Comply With The Law?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, go here:
Post Tags & Post Categories
WordPress post tags & post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your web pages.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better organize and index your website.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your website’s post tags and post categories during the Website Planning Stage.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post categories and tags have been correctly set up to deliver optimal results.
A Site Map Of Your Pages and Posts
A site map that lists all of your posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools discover your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
Note: 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 interpret. Although search engines like Google can index your site 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 results in increased traffic.
Don’t Forget Your Site’s 404 Error Page
When online visitors type in the wrong URL or click on a hyperlink pointing to a destination on your website that no longer exists, they are presented with a 404 Not Found error page …
(A WordPress 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then is post new content on a regular basis to automatically begin bringing web traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different components and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take some web developers a long time to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is covered in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This article is part of an article series designed to help you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively and drive traffic automatically using a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven web marketing methods.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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