Welcome to Part Three of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated web traffic generating machine using WordPress.
In Part One of this article series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is add content consistently to automatically bring more web traffic!)
In Part 2, 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 site, and what to do if your existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this section of the series, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic system. We explain how to configure a WordPress site to attract traffic automatically simply by publishing fresh content on your website.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. With business becoming ever more competitive worldwide, it’s worth learning about any opportunity you can to increase your own competitiveness online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous competitive advantage. For business owners, an expertly configured website means having an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s a simple way to explain the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only are more steps needed to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this here’s an amusing anecdote.
A Semi-True Story …
Everything is humming along in the widget manufacturing plant when suddenly, the equipment stops.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the manager decides to call in an expert.
Soon afterward, the expert arrives and, without uttering a word, immediately walks towards the control box. After staring at the box for 5 minutes, the expert then takes out a teeny-weeny hammer from his pocket and makes a single tap near the left side of the box.
Immediately, everything springs back to life.
The plant manager is greatly overjoyed 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 a request for payment of $5,000.
Outraged and bewildered, the factory manager dials the expert. Why were they charged so much for less than 5 minutes work? He then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive visitors to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when the machines stopped functioning and no one in the factory floor had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have every right to be compensated fairly for spending years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to immediately avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your website configured so all you have to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other traffic-generating 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 experts often make complex solutions look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few internal settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install to add desired functionalities to your site.
- Which third-party services you need to set up and activate to achieve desired results
- Which settings you need to configure in order to ensure that processes will work as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving 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 complicated. The reason why is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring a plugin, clicking a couple of buttons, or tweaking some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration phase involves the integration of various different parts including your web hosting server, your site, and a number of third-party sites and services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we create a simple flowchart of the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these areas in more detail.
Configuring Your Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for website installation purposes. We’re talking about configuring settings in your server that affect how your website will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic you will attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like implementing spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess and error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these, the next step is to configure a number of third-party sites and services.
External Web Properties & Accounts – Configuration
The purpose of choosing external sites is that all of your content should be posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, syndicate automatically to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After adding these external platforms to your network, content with links pointing back to your site will be automatically fed to these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social media accounts, even to visitors attracted to the platform itself. Your business will receive exposure online, helping your business tap into a whole new audience and source of traffic.
Some sites will need to be set up before configuring your site’s settings to help save time 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:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Webmasters lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with important data, SEO tools and reports about your website.
Once your account and site details with Google are set up, this information can be used 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 performance, SEO, marketing efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, you can add your account information to WordPress using a Google Analytics plugin and send data instantly to other useful applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account and entering site data, this information can be used with web traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress provides users with a self-hosted and a 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 some great features, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your traffic system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your social media and social bookmarking accounts before you can configure these as part of 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 social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site.
Set up accounts and profile pages with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with and syndicate your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick those that will work well with your setup and/or content syndication tools (we will review some of these tools in greater detail during the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to many social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your own RebelMouse account.
There are many different platforms that can be incorporated into your own web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up third-party site accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
Configuring Your WordPress Site
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 points.
Global WordPress Settings
Your WordPress administration area contains a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and often overlooked traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(WordPress 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 or your webmaster have purposely configured your site settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the list of update services entered into the Update Services text area
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section displays only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list containing all of the update services you want notified to this section and WordPress takes care of the rest …
(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
***
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 your content gets seen by visitors 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 summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website to get 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 your traffic system is concerned, however, the most important setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to notify all the update services you have listed 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, do not check this box …
(WordPress Settings – 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 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)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow your site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks Section)
Here are some of the ways search-friendly URLS can be configured …
(Configuring post permalinks)
We have written a detailed tutorial on using WordPress permalinks here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
WordPress Plugins – Configuration
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
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. No site is guaranteed immunity from cyber-attacks.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
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 traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress Plugins For SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO can significantly improve your SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to find and index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with free or inexpensive plugins)
There are loads of free or inexpensive social sharing plugins available for WordPress users.
Many social sharing plugins let you choose which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which visitors can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, some themes also give you options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes can be configured for better traffic results)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing features to your website is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons and enabling the feature …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Additional Features Of WordPress To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the traffic configuration process, are the areas that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Compliance Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and unwelcome traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you are making money online (or plan to), you need to ensure that your website remains compliant with all legal requirements.
(Is Your Website Legally Compliant?)
If you need help understanding how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your site, see this article:
Categories & Tags
Post categories and tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your pages.
(WordPress post categories help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which improves traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s tags and categories during the Website Planning Phases.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories that have been set up.
HTML Site Map
A site map that displays all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites find more of your online content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although Google will index your pages 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 WordPress 404 Page
When visitors searching online for your site type in the wrong web address or click on a dead link, they will typically be greeted with a 404 Not Found page …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
A 404 page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect web 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 from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do to attract more web traffic is publish web content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of various components and external web properties …
(WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some website professionals a long time to acquire.
Once you have expertly 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 section of the series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively with a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven marketing methods that are easy and quick to implement.
Subscribe To WPCompendium.org And Get Notified Of New WordPress Tutorials!
***
"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com
***