Welcome to Part Three of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a site into an automated traffic generating machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is post new content consistently to automatically start generating more traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this section of the series, we look at the configuration stage of the traffic automation process. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site to drive new traffic automatically whenever you publish web content on your website.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Businesses are becoming increasingly more competitive and are researching any and every advantage they can to increase their competitiveness online.
Having the ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge advantage over other competitors. An expertly configured WordPress site gives your business a flying start and an immediate advantage online.
The Difference Is In The Configuration Stage
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 is a simple way to explain the difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only are more steps required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing little story.
A Semi-True Story …
Things were going just fine in the widget factory when everything ground to a sudden stop.
As no one could figure out what went wrong, the plant manager decided to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert immediately headed towards the control box. After staring silently at the wires and circuitry for less than 5 minutes, the expert then took out a little hammer from his pocket and made a single tap near the right edge of the control unit.
Immediately, everything came back to life.
The floor manager was grateful and relieved as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the factory manager received an invoice for the amount of $5,000.
The factory manager called the expert, demanding to know why the expert had charged them so much for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work. He then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice arrived and was placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the factory floor 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 spending years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly repair a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your WP web site set up so all you had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest 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 site?)
Although the solution to many problems often seems quite simple once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring site settings for clients. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which third-party accounts you need to set up to get desired outcomes
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure to make sure things function to plan, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not technically difficult, but it’s quite involved and time-consuming. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing a solution, clicking a button, or tweaking some options and settings in your dashboard area … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of many parts such as your web hosting server, your website or blog, and various external sites …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved in more detail.
Configuring Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for site installation purposes. We’re talking about configuring settings in your server that affect how you will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your business will attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for good and bad traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirections, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these, the next step is to set up and configure a number of external sites and services.
External Sites
The purpose of 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 applications.
Once these external sites have been added to your setup, content linked back to your site gets automatically added to these platforms. Your content and business benefits from increased exposure online, helping your business tap into new sources of traffic.
Some sites and online solutions will need to be set up before configuring your 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)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with essential data, SEO tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account, use this 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 results, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrals, etc.
After setting up your Once you have set up your Google Analytics account, your account information can be added to WordPress using a simple Google Analytics plugin and and fed to other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account and site details with Bing have been set up, this information can be used to automate traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers users a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to grow a professional business presence online.
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 show you how to integrate this into your automated web traffic system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and bring new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social media 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 visitors to your site.
Make sure you have pages set up with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick the ones that will work with your system and/or content syndication tools (we discuss some of these tools in more detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(There are lots of social sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging web platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free levels, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add an RSS feed from your WordPress site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your RebelMouse social feed.
There are many different solutions you can add to your own web traffic system. Please contact us if you would like to explore some of these and discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up external service accounts, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress – Configuring Your Web Site
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 of the important areas.
Configuring WordPress Settings
The WordPress admin area contains a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most powerful and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As stated in the Update Services section,
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, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services text box
By default, only one service is listed …
(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 and WordPress takes care of the rest …
(WordPress lets you 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 Settings
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 traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your 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.
The most important setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Generally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to instantly ping all the update services you have listed in the Update Services section 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 unticked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings)
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 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow your site to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s permalink URLs …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
We have created a detailed tutorial on using WP permalinks here: Configuring WordPress Permalinks
WordPress – Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Let’s take a brief look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that affect traffic generation
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the 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 site.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
For more information, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(WP Plugins For SEO – Yoast SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s search engine optimization. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines to find, crawl and index, it also lets you specify how to display your content to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if your site provides content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Most social sharing plugins allow you to select which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some 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 Features In Themes
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 website, some themes also provide built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes like Graphene (a free theme) can be configured for improved traffic results)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing features to your content is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons and enabling the function …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)
Additional Features Of WordPress To Configure
Last but not least in the configuration process, are the components that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and unwelcome traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to 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 site complies with all government laws and regulations.
(Does Your Site Comply With The Law?)
To learn more about the importance of having a compliant website, see this article:
Post Categories & Tags
WordPress categories & tags help search engines index your website, which improves traffic.
(WordPress categories help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your website’s categories and tags should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Process.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the tags and categories that have been set up.
Add A Site Map
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications find more of your site’s content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although Google can index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
Configure Your 404 Page Not Found
When visitors type in the wrong URL into their browser or click on a hyperlink pointing to a destination on your site that no longer exists, they are greeted with a 404 Not Found error page …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 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 in your server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then is add content on a consistent basis to automatically begin attracting new web traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many web professionals a long time to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is addressed in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Three
To keep reading this article, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials aimed at helping business owners learn how to grow their business and drive traffic sustainably using a WordPress website or blog and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
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