Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create 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 site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically begin bringing web traffic is post web content consistently!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a website 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 where to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration stage of this process. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that web traffic will automatically start flowing as you begin posting new content on your web site.
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Configuration
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by website owners as their greatest challenge online. Businesses are becoming ever more competitive and are researching every advantage available to increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge advantage. An expertly configured website gives you a significant advantage from the very start.
The Configuration Stage 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 a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s one way to understand the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence plus an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only are more steps required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special type of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with a story.
A Semi-True Story …
All is going fine in the widget-making workshop when suddenly, all machines grinds to a complete stop.
As no one can figure out what’s wrong, the manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert heads straight towards the control box. After staring at the control unit for 3 minutes, the expert then produces a teeny-weeny little hammer from his utility belt and makes a gentle tap near the right-hand corner of the unit.
Immediately, everything comes back to life.
The floor manager is relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a request of payment for services for the sum of $5,000.
Angry and confused, the manager picks up the phone and rings the expert. Why were they charged so much for less than 5 minutes work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive traffic to their sites.
How much money did the factory stand to lose when the equipment stopped working and no one on the factory floor was able to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have every right to be compensated fairly for having spent years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to immediately assess and fix a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a web site fully set up so all you had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other online properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your website?)
Although the solution to many challenges often seems ridiculously simple once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than installing a website and configuring a few internal settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins you need to install to get certain functionalities on your site.
- Which services you need to set up to achieve desired results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured in order to make sure everything will work as envisioned, etc.
(Driving 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 involved and complicated. The reason why is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring a solution, configuring some options and settings in your dashboard area or clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a complex process that involves your server, your web site, and various external sites and/or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart of the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these areas in more detail.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is configuring settings in your server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your business may attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been fine-tuned and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites.
External Sites & Accounts – Configuration
The basic concept of adding external sites is that all content gets published from a central location (your site) and from there, it gets automatically distributed to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you incorporate these external platforms into your network, content with links pointing back to your site is automatically fed to search, social and aggregator sites. Your website will be exposed to a new audience and new sources of traffic.
Some web properties and online services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress settings to speed up the 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 Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmasters – 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 site owners with essential information, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your account has been set up, you can use your details to automate web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic results, SEO, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account has been set up, tracking information can be added to WordPress using a plugin and automatically sent to other useful applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. After setting up your account, the account information can be used with traffic settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your automated traffic system in Part Four of this series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your various social accounts 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 and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts and profiles set up with all the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can set up and syndicate your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose the ones that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we will cover some of these tools in more detail further below and in the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to loads of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online technology platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add a feed from your WordPress site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your page.
There are various technologies and third-party applications you can incorporate into your traffic system. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with third-party services, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
Your WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and often overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Screen)
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 purposely configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of services entered into the Update Services field
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is listed …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
WordPress lets you 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 Settings
This section affects how visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence web traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to view the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is ticked or not.
Typically, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to automatically ping your update services list whenever a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion
Although this section is 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the ways permalink URLs can be configured …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
If you need help setting up permalinks, refer to this tutorial: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality to your site, 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 the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, securing your website or blog is something you simply 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 botnets and hackers.
Go here for more details:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress Plugin)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously 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 and index, it also lets you specify how to present your content to Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with their social networks can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you publish content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins.
Most social plugins let you specify 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 social sharing plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your site which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings For Traffic Generation
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 layout and design elements of your website, some themes also give you built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your site is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features)
Configuring Additional WordPress Sections
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic configuration process, are the components that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you do business online (or are planning to), you need to ensure that your website is compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business online.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?)
We have created a detailed article about how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website here:
WordPress Categories & Tags
WordPress categories and tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better organize and index your website.
(Post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and post categories should be discussed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phases.
When considering ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s tags and categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal benefits.
Visitor 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 sites discover your web content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Only search engines can understand an XML sitemap. Although Google will index your site just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – A Source Of Lost Traffic Opportunities!
When visitors searching for your site type in the wrong web address or click on a dead hyperlink, they are presented with a 404 page …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
A 404 Not Found error page can be configured to funnel traffic to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up on your web server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your website or blog fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do to automatically drive more traffic is add fresh content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of different elements and external web properties …
(WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise required to perform this phase of the traffic automation process can take many web professionals months to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is covered in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read more, click here:
This article is part of an article series designed to help you learn how to grow your business using a WordPress-driven website and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
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