Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic machine using WordPress.
In Part 1 of this series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is publish content on a consistent basis to automatically bring more web traffic!)
In Part 2, we looked at 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 everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In this section, we will discuss the configuration phase of this process. We explain how to configure a WordPress site to start driving traffic automatically when you begin to add web content on your site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Businesses are becoming ever more competitive worldwide and are looking for any advantage they believe will increase their competitiveness online.
Having the ability to automatically generate traffic on demand is a tremendous advantage over the competition. With an expertly configured website, your business has a significant advantage from the word “go”.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to understand the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does it take more work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special type of expertise.
Let me illustrate this with a joke.
A Semi-True Story …
Everything was humming along in the gizmo plant when production suddenly stopped.
As no one could figure out what went wrong, the plant manager decided to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert headed immediately towards the control box. After staring silently at the wires and circuitry for less than 5 minutes, the expert then took out a tiny hammer and made a gentle tap near the left side of the box.
Immediately, everything sprang to life.
The floor manager was overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager received a request of payment for services for the sum of $5,000.
The manager picked up the phone and called the expert, demanding to know why they were being charged such an exorbitant fee for so little time spent delivering such minimal amount of work and then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrived and was placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive traffic to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when the machines ground to a halt and no one on the business had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to demand fair compensation for years spent acquiring the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to fix a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress blog fully configured so all you had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other traffic-generating web properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your website?)
Although experts often make complicated things look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to work things out.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than installing a website and configuring a few basic settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed to add certain functionalities to your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up and activate to achieve certain outcomes
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure to ensure that everything functions exactly as you expect, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite complicated. This is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring one or two plugins, configuring some settings in your admin area or clicking a button … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a complex process that involves your server, your site, and various third-party sites and/or online services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If the activities involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a better look at what’s involved.
Web Server Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your hosting account for site installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your web server specifically for handling web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your web 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 your business may attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include things like implementing spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess and 404 redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been checked and configured, the next step is to set up and configure a number of external sites or online services.
Configuring External Web Properties
The concept behind adding external sites is that all content is posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it gets automatically distributed to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After incorporating these external platforms into your network, content pointing back to your website gets automatically added to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your website will be exposed to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some sites and online services will need to be set up before configuring your site’s settings to 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 Search Console)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of essential information, tools, and reports about their website.
Once your Google Search Console account and site details are set up, your account information can be used to automate web traffic-related settings 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 traffic results, SEO, marketing efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
After setting up your account and site details, account code can be added to all of your web pages in WordPress via a simple plugin and and sent to many other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account and entering site details with Bing Webmaster Tools, the details can be used with web traffic-related settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress provides users with a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to build a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your traffic system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need your various social media accounts set up 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 bring new traffic to your site.
You should have accounts and profiles set up with all the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick the ones that will work with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(You can post your content to lots of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online platforms and content aggregators that can act as second-tier sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add an RSS feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your social feed.
There are many different platforms you can add to your 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.
After you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
The WordPress admin area contains a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Area)
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 purposely chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services field
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(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
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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 in this section can influence web traffic. For example, your choice to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog 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 traffic is concerned, however, the most important setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is ticked or not.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to automatically ping various update services when a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
Discussion Settings
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 sites 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 Screen)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your permalinks …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, go here: Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks
Configuring Settings – WP Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add just about every kind of functionality imaginable to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Let’s 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 website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you simply cannot ignore the importance of securing your website or blog.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to bots and hackers.
For more details, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages easily indexable …
(SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help increase traffic by making your website more search engine friendly)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines to find and index, it allows you to 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 boost traffic to your site, especially if you publish content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can add social features to your site easily with WordPress plugins.
Many social sharing plugins allow you to choose which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which users can unlock by liking your page.
Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, some themes also give you built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing features to your content is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons to enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic System Configuration – Additional Features
Last but not least in the web traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Compliance Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase 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 when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you make money online (or plan to), it’s important that your site is compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business practices online.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article on how to quickly add legal pages to your site here:
Categories & Post Tags
WordPress categories and tags help search engines index your web pages, which helps to increase traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your website.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s tags and categories should be discussed and set up during the Website Planning Phase.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the categories and tags that have been set up.
Add A Site Map
A visitor site map that displays all of your posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications discover more of your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. Although Google can index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Your 404 Page
When visitors searching online for your site enter the wrong URL or click on an invalid link, they are presented with a 404 error page …
(Default 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 recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your web server, there are several plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your website fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then to begin bringing new traffic is post content consistently.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different components and web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of skills and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take some website developers a long time to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as you can. This step is explained in the next article in our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Part 3
To continue reading this article, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively with a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven online marketing methods.
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