Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic generating machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is publish fresh content on a regular basis to attract more web traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at critical setup decisions. 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 existing site was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic system. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site so you can automatically start to get new traffic when you start posting new content on your website.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as their greatest challenge online. With business becoming ever more competitive, it’s worth looking into any advantage that can help you get better results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand is a tremendous advantage over the competition. For WordPress users, an expertly configured website means having an immediate 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 developer but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here is a simple way to describe the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does it take extra labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special type of expertise.
To illustrate this here is a joke.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
All was humming along in the gizmo factory when things suddenly came to a halt.
As no one could figure out what happened, the floor manager decided to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrived and walked immediately to the main control box. After staring silently at the wiring board for 5 minutes, the expert then took out a tiny hammer from his tool box and made a single tap about three inches from the left corner of the control unit.
Immediately, everything began to work once again.
The floor manager was overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the manager received an invoice for $5,000.
The manager called the expert, demanding to know why the expert had charged them such a ludicrous fee for less than five minutes work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrived and was placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new visitors to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the business had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to demand fair compensation for years spent building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to assess and repair a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a blog configured so all you have to do is publish new content and search engines, social followers from sites like Facebook and LinkedIn and dozens of other traffic-generating online properties would be immediately 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?)
While many experts often make difficult things look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring some basic settings. It involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up to achieve desired outcomes
- Which settings need to be configured to make sure everything functions as envisioned, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite involved and complicated. It’s not just about installing a plugin, configuring some settings in your dashboard area or clicking a button … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration phase is a complex process that involves your server, your WordPress site, and a number of external sites and services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we try to flowchart the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram showing all the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a brief look at these steps.
Your Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your web server that affect how your site will handle all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic you may attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like configuring spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirections, etc?)
After your server settings have been checked and configured, the next step is to set up and configure a number of external sites.
External Sites
The concept behind setting up external sites is that all of your content gets posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it gets syndicated automatically to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After incorporating these external services into your setup, content linking back to your website will be automatically syndicated to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and site benefits from exposure online, helping you tap into new sources of traffic.
Some of the external sites and online solutions will need to have accounts 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 website or blog)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of useful information, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site details with Google Webmasters, your account information can be used with traffic-related settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s traffic performance, SEO, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account, your account data can be integrated with WordPress via a Google Analytics plugin used with other applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your account has been set up, use this information with web traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers users a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which various 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 automated web traffic generation system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site)
You will need your social media and social bookmarking accounts set up 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 pages and bring new traffic to your site.
Set up accounts and profile pages with all the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose those that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(There are loads of social sites you can post your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online platforms and content aggregators that can act as second-tier 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 a feed from your WordPress blog …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your website.
There are many different sites and platforms you can incorporate into your own traffic system. Please contact us if you would like to explore some of these and discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up external service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress Settings
Your WordPress admin area contains a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Section)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As described in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of update services entered into the Update Services text box
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section includes only one entry …
(Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(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 your content gets seen by visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog 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.
The main setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to automatically notify various update services whenever new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Global 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 content, 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 you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks Screen)
Here are some of the ways SEO-friendly URLs can be configured …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
To learn more about setting up WP permalinks, refer to this tutorial: Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings For Traffic Generation
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including 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 handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No site is immune from being attacked by hackers.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to botnets and hackers.
For more information, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(SEO plugins help increase traffic by making your site more search engine friendly)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines to find and index, it allows you to configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you publish content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site with free or inexpensive plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using WordPress plugins.
Many social share plugins allow you to select which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your site which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
WordPress – Traffic Generation Theme Features
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, many themes also include built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) include built-in traffic optimization features)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your website is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Additional Configuration Features For WordPress
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic system configuration process, are the areas that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you are making money online, you need to make sure that your website is found to comply with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?)
For a detailed article about the importance of having a legally compliant website, refer to this article:
Tags & Categories
Post categories & tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your pages.
(Categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your web pages.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s tags and categories should be set up during the Website Planning Phases.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post categories and tags that have been set up.
Add A Site Map
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites find more of your web content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, while an XML sitemap is mostly filled with code that only search bots can read. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just using 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.
Your WordPress 404 Page Not Found
When visitors searching online for your site type in the wrong web address or click on an invalid link, they will typically be presented with an error page (known as a 404 error page) …
(Default WordPress 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 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 several WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your website fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do to begin bringing more web traffic is publish new content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of various components and external web properties …
(WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many website professionals a long time to acquire.
Once you have 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 section of our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Three
To keep reading this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help you learn how to grow your business and drive traffic sustainably using a WordPress website and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
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