Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
In Part 1 of this article series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is post content on a consistent basis to automatically begin bringing traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to get started 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 existing website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration phase of this process. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site to automatically start getting new traffic whenever you publish fresh content on your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Phase
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive on a global scale and are looking for every opportunity they can to get better results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous advantage over the competition. An expertly configured website gives your business a flying start as soon as your site is launched.
The Configuration Phase Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here’s a simple way to understand the difference:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only are more steps required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this point here is an anecdote.
A Semi-True Story …
All is going fine in the widget assembly line when everything comes to a sudden stop.
No one can figure out what’s wrong and so the manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
The expert arrives shortly after being summoned and goes directly to the control box. After staring at the electronic components for what seems like about 3 minutes or less, the expert then takes out a teeny-weeny little hammer and makes a very gentle tap near the bottom-left side of the box.
Immediately, the plant comes back to life.
The manager is filled with joy as he thanks the expert, who leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives an invoice for the sum of $5,000.
Unable to hide his anger and bewilderment, the factory manager rings the expert. Demanding to know why the expert has charged them such a ludicrous fee for less than 5 minutes work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice arrives on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive visitors to their sites.
How much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the factory floor was able to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have every right to demand fair compensation for years spent acquiring the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to quickly assess and fix a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your website or blog set up so all you had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other web properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
Although the solution to many challenges may seem ridiculously easy once implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy when you try to figure things out.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than simply installing a website and configuring some basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install to get desired functionalities on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up and activated to achieve desired results
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure to make sure things will work as envisioned, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not so technically difficult, but it’s quite involved. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing and configuring one or two plugins, clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration stage is a complex process that involves your web hosting server, your website, and a number of external sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we were to create a simplified diagram of the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these steps.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your web server that affect how your website will handle all web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your business may attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for good and unwanted traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like integrating spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step is to set up and configure various external sites and services.
Configuring External Sites
The basic idea of setting up external sites is that all of your content will get published to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will be automatically distributed to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you add these external services to your configuration, content linking back to your site gets automatically added to search, social and aggregator sites. Your business receives exposure online, helping you tap into new sources of traffic.
Some sites will need to be set up before configuring your site’s 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 before configuring your site:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools – 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 you with a range of important information, SEO tools and reports about your website.
Once your account with Google Webmaster Tools are set up, you can use your account information with traffic-related settings and notifications 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 campaigns, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account and site details, you can add tracking code to WordPress via any of several Google Analytics plugins and feed data automatically to other useful applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account and site data with Bing Webmaster Tools are set up, you can use this information with web traffic settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress provides users with a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your automated traffic generation system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social media accounts set up in order to 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 sites and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site.
Set up accounts and profiles with all of the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can You can post your content to lots of social sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(There are lots of social sites you can post your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online platforms and content aggregators that can serve as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different users.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your website.
There are various platforms you can incorporate into your web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
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 of the important areas.
Global Settings
The WordPress administration area contains a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and often overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Section)
As stated below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely configured your settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the update services entered into the Update Services box
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section displays only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services 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
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 influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website to read 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 your traffic system is concerned, however, the main setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to instantly notify all the update services you have listed in the Update Services section when new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the ways your SEO-friendly URLs can be configured …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
If you need help setting up WordPress permalinks, go here: How To Configure Your WordPress Permalinks
Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality imaginable to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help your site generate more traffic
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is safe from being attacked by hackers.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to hackers and bots.
Go here for more info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving improving the way search engines like Google and Bing find and index your web pages …
(WordPress Plugin – Yoast SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find, classify and index, it also lets you configure 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 your visitors to share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social features to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
There are loads of free or inexpensive social sharing plugins to choose from.
Most social share plugins let you choose which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
WP Theme Features
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, many themes also include built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your pages is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Configuring Additional Features Of WordPress
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic system 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 site for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can hurt your business when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you make money online (or plan to), you need to make sure that your website complies with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, see this article:
WordPress Post Categories And Tags
Post categories & tags help improve traffic by improving your site’s SEO.
(Categories help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which improves traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s categories and tags should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phases.
When configuring your web site to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories you have set up.
Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites discover 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 thing. Although Google will index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
Configure Your WordPress 404 Error Page
When visitors searching online for your site enter the wrong web address or click on links pointing to pages on your website that no longer exist, they will typically be greeted with a 404 Not Found error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
A 404 Not Found page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your server, there are plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your site fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do is post content regularly to attract new web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of various elements and external web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise required to perform the configuration process typically takes many website developers a long time to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is explained in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read more, click on the link below:
This article is part of an tutorial series designed to help business owners learn how to grow their business online with a WordPress website and proven marketing methods that are easy and quick to implement.
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