Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is publish new content on a regular basis to automatically bring more web traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration stage of the WordPress traffic automation system. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured in order to ensure that new traffic will automatically start flowing just by publishing fresh content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business getting so much more competitive, it’s worth looking into any opportunity you can to increase your own competitiveness online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous advantage over the competition. Having an expertly configured WordPress site gives your business an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to understand the main difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only are more steps needed to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special type of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing anecdote.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
Everything was going fine in the gizmo-making workshop when suddenly, the equipment stopped.
No one could figure out what is wrong and so the floor manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert immediately walked to the main control box. After staring at the board for no more than 5 minutes, the expert then produced a teensy-weensy hammer and made a gentle tap about three inches from the left corner of the unit.
Immediately, everything started working once again.
The manager was overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager received a request of payment for services totalling $5,000.
The factory manager dialled the expert, demanding to know why they were charged such a large amount of money for less than five minutes work. He then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice arrived and was placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving traffic to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when the equipment stopped functioning and no one on the factory floor had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to demand fair compensation for spending years developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to quickly fix a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WP site set up and configured so all you have to do is publish new content and search engines, social followers from sites like Facebook and Twitter and dozens of other web properties would be instantly 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 challenges is often quite easy once it’s been implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few internal settings. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs need to be installed for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which third-party services need to be set up to get specific results
- Which settings you need to configure to ensure that things will work as planned, 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 and time-consuming. It’s not as simple as installing one or two plugins, clicking a button, or configuring some settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a process that involves your web hosting server, your website or blog, and a number of third-party sites or online services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart of the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these areas in more detail.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for site installation purposes. We’re talking about configuring settings in your server that affect how you will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your web-hosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic you can attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for good and unwanted traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like integrating server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been fine-tuned and configured (if required), the next step is to set up and configure a number of external sites or online solutions.
External Accounts
The basic idea of adding external sites is that all content should be posted to a central location (your site) and from there, get distributed automatically to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After incorporating these external services into your configuration, content linking back to your website is automatically syndicated to these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social networks, even to visitors attracted to the platform itself. Your website will receive 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 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 Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with essential data, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your Google Webmasters account has been set up, you can use this information to automate web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s traffic results, SEO, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data have been set up, traffic tracking information can be integrated with WordPress using a simple Google Analytics plugin and and fed to various other useful applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. After setting up your account and entering site data, your account information can be used to automate traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers both a self-hosted (WordPress.org) and a hosted (WordPress.com) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you are planning to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your automated traffic generation system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and bring new traffic to your site)
You will need your social media accounts set up 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 sites and bring new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have set up accounts with all the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are many social sites you can You can post your content to many social sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose those that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools (we discuss some of these tools in more detail during the Automation phase).
(There are many social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online technology platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary-level traffic generation sources. 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 site that lets you add a feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your RebelMouse account.
There are many different sites and platforms you can add to your own traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
Configuring WordPress Settings
By default, your WordPress administration area includes a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and often overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Section)
As stated in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally configured your site settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the list of services entered into the Update Services text area
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section lists only one entry …
(WordPress Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(You can 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
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 traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to read the rest of the content from excerpts, 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 check box is ticked or not.
Generally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to automatically notify all the update services you have specified in the Update Services field whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
Discussion
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 publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s post permalinks …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, go here: Setting Up WordPress Permalinks
WordPress Traffic Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that can add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Let’s look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to attract more visitors to your site
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, web security is something you cannot afford to ignore.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
To learn more, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web content more indexable …
(WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find, crawl and index, it also lets you specify how to present your content to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you publish content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social features to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using WordPress plugins.
Many social share plugins allow you to choose which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads which users can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress – Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, some themes also include built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a free theme) allow you to configure options and settings for better traffic results)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing features to your website is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Other Areas To Configure
Last but not least in the web traffic configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle good and unwanted traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online (or plan to), it’s important that your website stays compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
For a detailed article about how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress site, go here:
Tags & Categories
WordPress post categories & tags help search engines better classify and index your web pages, which helps to increase traffic.
(Post categories help to improve your site’s search optimization, which improves traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and post categories should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phases.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the tags and categories you have set up.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A site map that lists all of your posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools find your website content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, while an XML sitemap contains code that only search engines can understand. Although Google can index your site just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
Configure Your Site’s 404 Page Not Found
When online visitors enter the wrong URL or click on a hyperlink pointing to an incorrect destination on your site, they are presented with a 404 Not Found page …
(Default WordPress 404 Error Page)
A 404 Not Found page can be turned into a useful source of traffic to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error 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 plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do to automatically begin attracting web traffic is post fresh content on a regular basis.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different components and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise required to perform this phase of the traffic automation process can take many website professionals months 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 addressed in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Part Three
To continue reading, click here:
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-powered website and proven marketing methods that are easy and quick 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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