Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically begin bringing more traffic is add great content regularly!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase. We explained 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 website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we will look at the configuration stage of the WordPress traffic automation system. We will show you why an expertly configured WordPress site is different than a professionally configured one. You will also discover just what kind of work needs to be done to make sure that when everything is fully set up and configured, new traffic will automatically start flowing as you begin to add web content on your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as one of their greatest challenges online. Also, the business landscape is becoming increasingly more competitive on a global scale and businesses are exploring any and every opportunity they can to get better results online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous advantage over other competitors. With an expertly configured WordPress site, you have a significant competitive advantage from the very start.
The Difference Is In The Configuration Stage
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here is a simple way to describe the main difference:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only are more steps needed 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 anecdote.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
All was moving along in the gizmo assembly line when things ground to a sudden halt.
As no one could figure out what happened, the manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert immediately went towards the main control box. After staring at the schematics for less than 2 minutes or so, the expert then took out a tiny little hammer from his pocket and made a very gentle tap near the bottom-left side of the control unit.
Immediately, everything sprang back to life.
The plant manager was delighted 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 a request of payment for services for $5,000.
The manager picked up the phone and dialled the expert, demanding to know why they were expected to pay so much for less than five minutes work and promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice arrived and was placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive visitors to their sites.
How much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production stopped working and no one on the business had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert not have the right to ask to be compensated fairly for investing years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress site set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social networks and dozens of other online 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 site?)
While experts often make complex things look easy, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring some basic settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which plugins need to be installed to add certain functionalities to your site.
- Which 3rd-party services need to be set up to get certain results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured to ensure that things function to plan, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite complicated. It’s not as simple as installing a piece of software, clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of different parts including your web hosting server, your site, and various third-party sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we were to create a simplified diagram of all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings in your web hosting account specifically for handling web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your webhosting account settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic you will attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After your server settings have been checked and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and services.
External Accounts
The concept behind adding external sites is that all content gets published to one central location (your site) and from there, it then gets distributed automatically to other components of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you incorporate these external platforms into your network, content linked back to your site will be automatically syndicated to search, social and aggregator accounts. Your site will be exposed to a new audience and source of traffic.
Some external sites will need to be set up before configuring your site to help speed up the process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts before configuring your settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Search Console 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 diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site details with Google, use the information with web traffic-related settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data have been set up, you can add traffic tracking information to WordPress using plugins and send data automatically to various other applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your account with Bing Webmaster Tools are set up, the details can be used to automate traffic settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers both 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 a number of useful features, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. 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
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your various social accounts in order to 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 social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts and profiles set up with all of the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select those that will work well with your system and/or content syndication tools.
(There are loads of social sites you can syndicate your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your RebelMouse website.
There are many different technologies and third-party applications you can incorporate into your web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore this area further and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with third-party sites, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
Configuring WordPress For Traffic
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
Configuring WordPress Settings
Your WordPress administration area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and frequently overlooked traffic notification system …
(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 specifically chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the update services entered into the Update Services field
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section lists only one entry …
(Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section …
(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 have an influence web traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to read the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The main setting in this section as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Typically, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to instantly ping your list of update services when a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion
Although this section is 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalinks
Permalinks enable your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
Here are some of the options for configuring your SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring post permalinks)
We have created a detailed tutorial about using WP permalinks here: Changing Your WordPress Permalinks
WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No blog is guaranteed immunity from being attacked.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to bots and hackers.
Go here for more information:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(WordPress SEO plugins help increase traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google to index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins to choose from.
Many social plugins let you specify which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which users can unlock by liking your page.
Configuring Settings – Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring design and layout elements of your website, many themes also include built-in options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a free theme) include built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons to your pages is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Other Areas To Configure For Increased Traffic
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you do business online (or plan to), you need to make sure that your website remains compliant with all laws and regulations.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
If you need help understanding how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your website or blog, refer to this article:
Post Tags & Post Categories
Tags & post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.
(WordPress post categories help search engines classify and index your pages, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s post tags and post categories should be set up during the Website Planning Phases.
When considering ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and categories have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits and results.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A site map that displays all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools discover your online 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 two different things. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, whereas an XML sitemap is mostly just a bunch of code that only search engine bots can interpret. Although search engines like Google will index your site just using 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 results in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – An Additional Source Of Traffic!
When visitors searching for your website type in the wrong web address or click on links pointing to destinations on your website that no longer exist, they are presented with a 404 Not Found page …
(Default WordPress 404 Error Page)
A 404 page can redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover 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 inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site expertly configured and fully set up, all you then have to do is post new content on a consistent basis to automatically begin attracting web traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of various components and external web properties …
(WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of skills and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many web developers a long time to learn.
Once you have 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 article in the series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read more, click here:
This article is part of an tutorial series designed to help you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively using a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven online marketing strategies.
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