Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your website using WordPress.
In Part 1 of this series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to begin attracting web traffic is post fresh content consistently!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase of the automation process. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will discuss the configuration phase of the traffic blueprint. We will show you why an expertly configured WordPress site is different. You will also learn what type of work is required to ensure that when everything is set up and configured, new web traffic will automatically start flowing just by posting web content on a regular basis to your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive on a global scale and are researching every advantage they can to improve their performance and results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous advantage over the competition. With an expertly configured website, your business has an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
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 an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here’s one way to describe the differences:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence plus an automated online business marketing process!
(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, but also a special type of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this point here’s an amusing story.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
Everything is running smoothly in the widget-making plant when things suddenly stop.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the plant manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert walks directly towards the main control box. After staring silently at the circuit board for less than 2 minutes, the expert then produces a teeny-weeny little hammer and makes a gentle tap about one inch from the left-hand edge of the box.
Immediately, everything comes back to life.
The plant manager is overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a bill for $5,000.
With great anger, the manager calls the expert. Why were they expected to pay such an exorbitant fee for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice 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 driving visitors to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one in the factory floor had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to be compensated fairly for having invested years developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly repair a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress web site fully configured so all you have to do is publish content to it and search engines, social networking sites and dozens of other traffic-generating online properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
While many experts often make complex situations and problems look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few internal settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install to get certain functionalities on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up and activated to get specific results
- Which settings need to be configured to make sure things function as envisioned, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite involved and complicated. This is because it’s not as simple as installing 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 process that involves your server, your web site, and various third-party sites and/or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart of all the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Web Server Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for site installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about tweaking settings in your server that affect how your site will handle all web traffic …
(During 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 your website can attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for both good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like integrating server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step is to configure a number of external sites and online services.
External Services
The basic concept of adding external sites is that all content is published from a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it radiates outwards automatically to other parts of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external services have been added to your traffic system, content pointing back to your site is automatically syndicated to these platforms, indexed by search engines and distributed to social sites, even to users of the platform itself. Your content will then receive additional exposure online, helping you tap into a whole new audience and traffic source.
Some of these external sites will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site to 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 Search Console – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with useful data, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your account has been with Google are set up, use this information 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 results, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrals, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account, your account information can be added to all of your web pages in WordPress using plugins and and fed to other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your account has been set up, the information can be used with traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers users the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to grow a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful 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 web 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 attract new traffic to your site)
You will need your social media accounts set up in order to integrate these with 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 and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have set up profiles with all of the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick the ones that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools (we discuss some of these tools in greater detail in the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to many social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online technology platforms and content aggregators that can act as second-tier sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different user types.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add a feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute social content to social networks)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your own RebelMouse account.
There are many different solutions you can add to your own traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore some of these further and discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up third-party service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global Settings – WordPress
Your WordPress admin area contains a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As stated in this 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 prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services text area
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section contains only one entry …
(Writing Settings – WordPress Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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 on this page 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 readers and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your site to read the rest of the content from summaries, 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 in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Typically, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows your site to instantly notify all the update services you have listed whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have 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 this section is mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to sites 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 Section)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow you to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the ways your site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
If you need help setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring WordPress Traffic Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add almost every kind of functionality to your site, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Let’s look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No website is immune from being hacked.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to hackers and botnets.
Go here to learn more:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your web pages …
(SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index, it also lets you configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if your site provides content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with WordPress plugins.
Most social share plugins let you specify which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
WordPress Themes
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 site, some themes also provide built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing features to your pages is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)
Configuring Other WordPress Settings For More Traffic
Last but not least in the web traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic, 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 any type of business online, you need to ensure that your website is found to comply with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate online business practices.
(Does Your Site Comply With The Law?)
We have created a detailed article about adding legal pages to WordPress here:
Post Tags And Categories
WordPress tags & post categories help search engines classify and index your web pages, which helps you get more traffic.
(WordPress categories help search engines index your website, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your website’s tags and categories should be set up during the Website Planning Process.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and post categories you have set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that lists all of your posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites discover more of your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, while an XML sitemap is code that only search engines can understand. Although search engines like 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.
Your 404 Error Page
When visitors searching for your site type in the wrong URL into their browser or click on hyperlinks pointing to an incorrect destination on your website, they are greeted with a 404 page …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up in your server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your website has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do is add great content consistently to start generating web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The skills and expertise required to perform the configuration stage of the traffic automation process can take some website professionals months to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help small business owners learn how to grow their business online cost-effectively and drive traffic organically using a WordPress website and proven web marketing methods.
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