Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically start generating more traffic is post web content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase. We explained 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 with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In this section, we look at the configuration phase of the WordPress traffic automation system. The focus of this section is to help you understand what makes an expertly configured WordPress site different from a professionally configured site. You will also understand just what kind of work is required to make sure that when all is fully configured, you can automatically get visitors simply by adding new content on your site.
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Configuration
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive on a global scale and are exploring every advantage they can to improve their performance and results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand is a tremendous advantage over the competition. For WordPress users, an expertly configured website allows their business to get off to a flying start from the moment their site is launched.
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 a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s one way to explain the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special type of expertise.
Allow me to illustrate this point with an amusing anecdote.
A Semi-True Story …
All is humming along in the widget assembly line when everything comes to a sudden stop.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the manager decides to call in an expert.
Promptly after arriving, the expert walks straight towards the main control box. After staring silently at the control unit for 2 minutes or so, the expert then produces a tiny little hammer and makes a single tap about three cm from the top-left edge of the box.
Immediately, everything comes back to life.
The manager is relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a bill for $5,000.
Angry and confused, the manager dials the expert. Why had he charged them such a ridiculously high fee for so little time delivering such minimal amount of work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive traffic to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the plant stand to lose when production stopped working and no one on the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for years spent acquiring the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to quickly avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WP website or blog set up so all you ever had to do is publish new content and search engines, social followers from Facebook and Twitter and dozens of other traffic-generating online properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your website?)
Although many experts often make complicated things look easy, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring some of the site settings for clients. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install to add various functionalities to your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up to achieve desired outcomes
- Which options need to be configured to make sure things function as envisioned, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the WordPress traffic automation system is not so technically challenging, but it’s quite complicated. This is because it’s not just about installing one or two plugins, clicking a button, or tweaking some settings in your dashboard area … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration stage is a complex process that involves your web hosting server, your WP site, and a number of third-party sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we create a simple flowchart of all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified diagram of the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Your Web Server – Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your hosting account for website installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your server that affect how you will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic you will attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for both bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like configuring spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After your web server settings have been checked and configured, the next step is to configure various external sites.
External Accounts
The idea behind adding external sites is that all of your content will be posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it will get automatically distributed to other components of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external services have been added to your setup, content linking back to your site is automatically syndicated to search, social and aggregator sites. Your content and site will be exposed to a new audience and source of traffic.
Some of the external sites will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress settings to help 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:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with important information, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your account and entering site details, the details can be used with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s traffic results, SEO, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data are set up, your account code can be added to all of your web pages in WordPress via plugins used with other applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your account and site data with Bing Webmaster Tools are set up, this information can be used to integrate and automate web traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers website owners a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to build a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your automated traffic generation system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need your social media accounts set up before you can 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 visitors to your site.
You should have accounts set up with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can You can syndicate your content to many social sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick the ones that will work with your system and/or content syndication tools (we will review some of these tools in greater detail in the Automation phase).
(There are lots of social sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add your WordPress site feed …
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 website.
There are many different solutions you can add to your own web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore some of these and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global WordPress Settings
The WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains an important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings)
As stated below 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 chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of services entered into the Update Services text box
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is available …
(Writing Settings – Update Services)
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 …
(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 have an influence web traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could play a part in someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website 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 in this section as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows your site to notify all the update services you have listed whenever a new post gets 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
Although discussion settings 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
To learn more about setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: How To Configure WordPress Permalinks
Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality to your website, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help drive more traffic to your site
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, securing your web sites is something you cannot ignore.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to botnet and hacker attacks.
Go here to learn more:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your site more search engine friendly …
(Yoast SEO – WP Plugins For SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find, classify and index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with their networks can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social features to your site using WordPress plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins available for WordPress.
Many social share plugins allow you to select which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to protect content which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WordPress Traffic Generation Theme Features – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, some themes also give you built-in options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for faster indexing, add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a free theme) include built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing features to your content is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure For Better Traffic Flow
Last (but by no means least) in the WordPress traffic blueprint configuration process, are the elements 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 visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online, you need to ensure that your site complies with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Site Comply With The Law?)
For a detailed article about the importance of having a legally compliant website, refer to this article:
WordPress Post Tags & Categories
Post tags & post categories help search engines index your web pages, which improves traffic.
(Post categories help to improve your site’s search optimization, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s post tags and post categories should be set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and post categories have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits and results.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools find 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 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.
404 Page Not Found – Don’t Forget This!
When online visitors type in the wrong web address or click on a dead link, they will normally be greeted with a 404 Not Found error page …
(A WordPress 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(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 on your web server, there are plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your site has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then is add great content on a consistent basis to generate more web traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different elements and web properties …
(WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration 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 addressed in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read more, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive tutorial series aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business using a WordPress website and proven marketing methods that are easy to implement.
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