Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a site into an automated traffic generating machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this 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 website or blog, all you have to do is post new content on a consistent basis to attract more traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase of the automation process. 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 site, and what to do if your site 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 phase of the WordPress traffic automation system. We will explain what makes an expertly configured site different than a professionally configured website. You will also learn how much work is required to make sure that when everything is set up and configured, you can automatically start to get new visitors when you begin adding fresh content on a regular basis on your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by business owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Businesses are becoming ever more competitive worldwide and are researching any advantage they can to improve their performance and results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand is a huge advantage. An expertly configured website gives you an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
The Configuration Process Is What Makes 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 developer but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s a simple way to explain the difference:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a web presence plus an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does a whole lot more labor go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special kind of expertise.
To illustrate this here’s a joke.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
Everything was running smoothly in the widget-making assembly line when things ground to a sudden halt.
As no one could figure out what happened, the floor manager decided to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert walked immediately towards the control box. After staring at the schematics for less than 3 minutes, the expert then produced a teensy-weensy little hammer from his utility belt and made a very gentle tap about 2 inches from the right edge of the box.
Immediately, everything came back to life.
The floor manager was grateful and relieved as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the manager received a request of payment for services rendered for $5,000.
The factory manager picked up the phone and called the expert, demanding to know why they were charged so much for less than five minutes work. He then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrived and was placed in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving web traffic to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when the machines 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 demand fair compensation for having invested years developing the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to assess and avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your 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 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 website?)
While experts often make complicated situations and problems look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy when you try to work things out.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than installing a website and configuring a few basic settings. It involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which 3rd-party services you need to set up to get specific results
- Which options need to be configured in order to ensure that things function as envisioned, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite involved and time-consuming. It’s not just about installing one or two plugins, configuring some options and settings in your admin 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 website or blog, and a number of external sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic diagram of the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these areas in more detail.
Your Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings in your hosting account specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web hosting account settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic your business may attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for both good and unwelcome traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like server-level spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess and 404 redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After your server settings have been fine-tuned and configured (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of external sites and services.
Configuring External Services
The basic idea of choosing external sites is that all of your content will be published to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will be automatically distributed to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After adding these external sites to your traffic system, content pointing back to your site will be automatically added to search, social and aggregator sites. Your business will then receive increased exposure online, helping your business tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of the external sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site’s settings to speed up the process 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 settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with important information, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your Google Search Console account is set up, this information can be used to integrate and automate traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrals, etc.
After setting up your Once you have set up your Google Analytics account, you can add tracking information to all of your pages in WordPress using plugins and feed data instantly to other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account is set up, use the account information with traffic settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress provides users with a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your 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 social media and social bookmarking accounts before you can integrate these with your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media accounts and get new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have set up accounts with all the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with and syndicate your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools (we will review some of these tools in more detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to many social bookmarking sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online technology platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add a feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute your content to social networks)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your social feed.
There are various sites and platforms you can add to your web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to 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 external service accounts, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress – Configuring Your Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
By default, all WordPress installations include a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and often overlooked traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services section
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is available …
(Writing Settings – Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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 web traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website to get 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 traffic is concerned, however, the most important setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to notify various update services when a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, make sure this box is left unchecked …
(Global Settings – 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 blogs 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings Screen)
The examples below show some of the ways permalink URLs can be configured …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
For a detailed tutorial on setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
WordPress Traffic Generation Plugin Settings – Configuration
WordPress provides users with plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality imaginable to your site, including many plugins that improve 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 site for handling 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, securing your sites is something you cannot ignore.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and botnets.
Go here for more details:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web content easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index …
(Yoast SEO – WP SEO Plugin)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your site’s search engine optimization. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages 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 GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with others can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
You can add social features to your site easily using free or inexpensive plugins.
Most social plugins allow you to 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 shares), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your pages which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, some themes also give you built-in options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for faster indexing, add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons to your website is as easy as clicking a few buttons and enabling the feature …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Configuring Other WordPress Features
Last (but by no means least) in the WordPress traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for both good and unwanted traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you do any kind of business online (or plan to), it’s important that your website is compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Site Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, see this article:
Post Tags & Post Categories
Post categories & tags help search engines index your pages, which improves traffic.
(Post categories help to improve your site’s SEO, which improves traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s tags and categories should be discussed and set up during the Website Planning Stages.
When configuring your website or blog to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories that have been set up.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
A site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites discover your web content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although Google can index your site just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
Don’t Forget Your 404 Error Page
When visitors searching for your site type in the wrong web address or click on a link pointing to a destination on your site that no longer exists, they are greeted with a 404 error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your web server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your website fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do is add web content on a regular basis to automatically start generating web traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different components and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take some website developers 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 article in the WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read more, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of articles designed to help you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively with a WordPress-powered website and proven web marketing methods.
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