Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic generation machine using WordPress.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to begin bringing new traffic is post content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we looked at critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to start 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 has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we look at the configuration stage of the traffic automation process. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to attract web traffic automatically whenever you post content to your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Also, the business landscape is becoming increasingly more competitive worldwide and businesses are exploring any and every advantage they believe will help them increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous advantage over the competition. For business owners, an expertly configured website means having a significant competitive advantage from the very start.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website 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:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and an 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.
Let’s illustrate this with a little story.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
Things were going well in the widget assembly line when everything ground to a sudden halt.
No one could figure out what is wrong and so the floor manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrived and headed immediately towards the control box. After staring silently at the wiring diagrams for less than 2 minutes or so, the expert then took out a teensy-weensy hammer from his shirt pocket and made a very gentle tap about 1 cm from the bottom-left edge of the control unit.
Immediately, everything started working once more.
The floor manager was filled with joy as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager received an invoice for $5,000.
The manager dialled the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged such a large amount of money for less than 5 minutes work. He then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrived in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving new visitors to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when the machines ground to a halt and no one in the business had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have every right to get paid fairly for years spent acquiring the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to immediately avert a very serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WP site set up so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube 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 attracting new visitors to your website?)
Although experts often make complicated solutions look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to figure things out.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring site settings for clients. It also requires 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 and activate to achieve desired outcomes
- Which options need to be configured in order to ensure that things work as planned, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite complicated. The reason why is because it’s not just about installing and configuring a solution, clicking on a button or two, or tweaking some settings in your dashboard area … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a process that involves your server, your WordPress site, and a number of external sites …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we create a simplified diagram of all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Configuring The Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about tweaking settings and options in your web server specifically for handling web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your site may attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both good and unwanted traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like integrating server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, setting up error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites.
External Sites
The basic idea of choosing external sites is that all of your content is published to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it then gets automatically distributed to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you incorporate these external sites into your traffic network, content linking back to your site is automatically added to these platforms. Your content will then be given exposure to a new audience and new sources of traffic.
Some of these sites will need to be set up before configuring your site’s settings to help speed up the configuration process 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 Webmasters – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of important information, SEO tools, and reports about their website.
Once your account and site data with Google are set up, you can use the 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 website’s traffic performance, SEO, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site details have been set up, traffic monitoring information can be added to all of your pages in WordPress via plugins and automatically sent to many other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account with Bing, your information can be used with traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers both the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your traffic system in Part Four of this series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site)
You will need your various social media and social bookmarking accounts set up in order to 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 and social bookmarking accounts and attract new traffic to your site.
You should set up accounts and profile pages with all of the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just select those that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we cover some of these tools in more detail further below and during the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to lots of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your own RebelMouse account.
There are various sites and platforms that can be added to your web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up third-party service accounts, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
Configuring WordPress Settings
By default, all WordPress installations include a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains an important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Screen)
As described below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services text area
By default, only one service is available …
(Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section …
(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 have an influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could play a part in someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to view the rest of the content from summaries, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The main setting here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Generally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to automatically ping your list of update services whenever new posts are 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 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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the ways your site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring post permalinks)
If you need help setting up permalinks, refer to this tutorial: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
WP Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add just about every kind of functionality to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is guaranteed immunity from a cyber attack.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to hackers and botnets.
Go here to learn more:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your website more search engine friendly …
(WP Plugins For SEO – Yoast SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines to find, classify and index, it allows you to specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with their friends and networks can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you publish great 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 to choose from.
Many social sharing plugins let you select which 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 shares), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings For Traffic Generation
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 layout and design aspects of your website, some themes also give you built-in options for improving SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes allow you to configure settings for improved traffic results)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your pages is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons and enabling the function …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic configuration process, are the areas that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Compliance Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with good and unwelcome traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online, it’s important that your website is found to comply with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article on adding compliance pages to WordPress here:
WordPress Tags & Categories
Post tags & categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better classify and index your website.
(Categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s post tags and post categories should be set up during the Website Planning Stages.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post categories and tags have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits and results.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications find more of your online 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 not the same things. Only search engine bots can understand XML sitemaps. Although search engines like Google can index your pages 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 results in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – Don’t Lose Traffic!
When visitors type in the wrong web address or click on a dead hyperlink, they are presented with an error page …
(A 404 Page)
A 404 Error Page can redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up on your server, there are several plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do to automatically start driving traffic is add new content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of different elements and external web properties …
(WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The skills and knowledge required to perform the configuration stage of the traffic automation process can take many website professionals a long time to acquire.
Once you have 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 Section Three
To keep reading this article, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of articles designed to help you learn how to grow your business and drive traffic sustainably using a WordPress website or blog and proven web marketing strategies.
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