Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is add great content consistently to automatically bring more web traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase of this process. We explained 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 website, and what to do if your existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we look at the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. You will learn why an expertly configured WordPress site is different. You will also learn just what type of work needs to be done to make sure that when all is fully configured, you can automatically bring web traffic just by adding new content on your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business getting so much more competitive worldwide, it’s worth looking into any advantage available to get better results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge competitive advantage. For businesses, an expertly configured website means having a significant advantage from the word “go”.
The Configuration Process Is What Makes All The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to describe the differences:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a web presence with an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only are more steps needed to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this here is a joke.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
All is going fine in the gizmo assembly workshop when everything suddenly stops working.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert immediately walks towards the main control box. After staring at the wires and circuitry for no more than 5 minutes, the expert then takes out a tiny hammer from his utility belt and makes a single tap about one inch from the left-hand corner of the control unit.
Immediately, the machinery starts working as before.
The floor manager is grateful and relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a request for payment of services rendered for $5,000.
Feeling furious, the manager calls the expert. Why had they had been charged so much for less than five minutes work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is driving visitors to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the business had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert not have the right to get paid fairly for spending years building up the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to quickly repair a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WP web site fully set up so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other web properties would be instantly 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 the solution to many problems is often ridiculously easy once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than installing a website and configuring a few internal settings. It involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which services you need to set up to get specific results
- Which settings need to be configured to make sure everything works as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this part of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite involved and complicated. It’s not just about installing one or two plugins, clicking a button, or configuring some settings in your dashboard area … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration phase involves the integration of various different components such as your web server, your website or blog, and various external sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we create a simplified flowchart of the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these steps.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your hosting account for website installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your web server that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your web server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic your site will attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for good and unwanted traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like configuring server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
After your web server settings have been fine-tuned and configured (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites.
External Accounts
The purpose of choosing external sites is that all content should be posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will get syndicated automatically to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you add these external platforms to your configuration, content with links pointing back to your website gets automatically syndicated to these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social networks, even to visitors attracted to the platform itself. Your content and website will be exposed to a new audience and new sources of traffic.
Some of the third-party sites will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site 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 Webmasters
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with useful information, tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account with Google Search Console, you can use your account information to integrate and automate web traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account has been set up, account information can be added to WordPress via a plugin and and fed to other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account and site details are set up, your details can be used with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress provides users with a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your web traffic generation system in Part Four of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your social media and social bookmarking accounts 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 attract new traffic to your site.
You should set up profiles with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can You can post your content to loads of social sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(You can post your content to many social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online web platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. 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 an RSS feed from your WordPress site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
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 RebelMouse website.
There are various sites and platforms you can incorporate into your own traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
WordPress Settings
By default, all WordPress installations include a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains an important and often overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As stated below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have specifically chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services text box
By default, this section contains only one entry …
(Writing Settings – WordPress Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of all the update services you want to notify as soon as you publish a new post to this section …
(You can 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 readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence web traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could play a part in 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 a partial feed, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Normally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to notify your update services list when a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion Settings
Although discussion settings 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks Screen)
The examples below show some of the ways site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
We have written a detailed tutorial on using permalinks in WordPress here: Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs
WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that can add just about every kind of functionality to your site, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Let’s look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No website is safe from being attacked by hackers.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to attacks from hackers and bots.
For more details, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(WP Plugins For SEO – Yoast SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to find, crawl and index, it also lets you specify how to display your content to Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content with members of their own online communities can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using free or inexpensive plugins.
Many social share plugins let you specify which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your site which visitors 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 can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, some themes also include built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With many themes, adding social sharing features to your content is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure
Last but not least in the web traffic 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 website for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you are making money online (or are planning to), it’s important that your website is compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
We have created a detailed article on adding legal pages to WordPress here:
Post Categories And Post Tags
Post tags and post categories help to improve your site’s SEO, which helps to increase traffic.
(WordPress post categories help search engines better classify and index your website, which improves traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s categories and tags should be discussed and set up during the Website Planning Phase.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s categories and tags have been correctly set up to deliver optimal results.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A visitor site map that lists all of your site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites find more of your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. Although Google can index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Page – Don’t Forget To Configure It!
When online users enter the wrong web address or click on an invalid link, they will normally be greeted with a 404 error page …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
A 404 page can be configured to funnel traffic to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error page can be set up in your server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your site has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you then need to do to automatically begin bringing new traffic is add web content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of various elements and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The expertise required to perform the configuration process can take many 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 explained in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read more, click here:
This article is part of an tutorial series aimed at helping business owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively and drive traffic sustainably with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven marketing strategies that are easy to implement.
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