Welcome to Part Three of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is add fresh content on a consistent basis to drive web traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start 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 site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this section, we will look at the configuration stage of the WordPress traffic automation system. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured in order to automatically start bringing traffic as you start adding fresh content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration Phase
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by business owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive and are researching any and every advantage available to improve their results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous advantage over the competition. Having an expertly configured WordPress site gives you an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
The Configuration Stage Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to explain the differences:
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 web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only is additional work required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special type of expertise.
Allow me to illustrate this with a little story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
Things are moving along in the widget assembly line when everything grinds to a sudden stop.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the floor manager decides to call in an expert.
Promptly after arriving, the expert immediately goes towards the control box. After staring silently at the circuit board for less than 2 minutes, the expert then takes out a tiny little hammer from his tool belt and makes a single tap about 1 cm from the left corner of the control unit.
Immediately, everything starts working as before.
The manager is grateful and relieved as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager receives an invoice for $5,000.
Feeling furious, the manager rings the expert. Demanding to know why they were charged such a large amount of money for less than five minutes work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive web traffic to their sites.
How much money did the widget plant stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one in the business was able to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to demand fair compensation for spending years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to fix a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your website set up and configured so all you have to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest 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 attracting new visitors to your site?)
Although many experts often make complicated things look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than just 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 to get specific functionalities on your site.
- Which third-party services you need to set up to get certain results
- Which settings you need to configure in order to make sure things will function as you have imagined, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this part of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically challenging, it can be quite involved and time-consuming. It’s not just about installing and configuring a plugin, configuring some options and settings in your dashboard area … it’s all this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a complex process that involves your web hosting server, your website, and a number of external sites and online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If we were to create a simplified flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the configuration process)
Let’s examine these steps in more detail.
Server Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your hosting account for site installation purposes. We’re talking about configuring settings in your webhosting account that affect how your website will handle all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic your site will attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up 404 redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been checked and configured (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and online services.
Integration With External Solutions
The purpose of choosing external sites is that all content will get posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will get automatically distributed to other components of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external platforms have been added to your configuration, content linking back to your site will get automatically fed to these platforms, indexed by search engines and distributed to social networks, even to users of the platform itself. Your content and site will benefit from increased exposure online, helping you tap into a whole new audience and traffic source.
Some of the sites and services will need to be 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 before configuring your WordPress site’s settings:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Webmasters lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of important information, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site details with Google, use your details with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s traffic performance, SEO, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, you can add traffic tracking information to all of your pages in WordPress using a simple Google Analytics plugin and feed data instantly to other online applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your account with Bing Webmaster Tools are set up, this information can be used to automate web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers both a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to grow a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your automated web traffic generation system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your various social media 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 pages and get new visitors to your site.
You should have pages set up with all of the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can You can post your content to lots of social bookmarking sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select those that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools (we cover some of these tools in greater detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to lots of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online web platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary-level sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute your content to social networks)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your social feed.
There are many different platforms you can incorporate into your traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore some of these and discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
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 points.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search indexing, 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 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 configured your settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of services entered into the Update Services text area
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section contains only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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
***
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 visitors will see your content 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 a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s choice 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 most important setting here 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 the box unchecked allows your site to automatically ping all the update services you have specified in the Update Services field whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(WordPress 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 sites linked to from your posts, 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 Screen)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s permalink URLs …
(Configuring post permalinks)
We have created a detailed tutorial about using permalinks here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring Settings – WP Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality to your website, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No site is safe from being attacked by hackers.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to hackers and botnets.
More information:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(Yoast SEO – WP Plugins For SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your site’s SEO. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index, it also lets you configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if your site provides content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with WordPress plugins)
You can add social features to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins.
Many social plugins allow you to choose which social sites your content can be shared 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 ‘lock’ content which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
WordPress – Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that 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, many themes also include built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes can be configured for better traffic results)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your site is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)
Additional Configuration Areas For WordPress
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic blueprint configuration process, are the things that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to your business as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online, you need to make sure that your website remains compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article about the importance of having a legally compliant website here:
Tags And Post Categories
WordPress categories and tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your website.
(Post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s SEO.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your site’s post tags and post categories earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
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 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 applications discover more of your web content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. HTML site maps are web pages that link to all other content on your site and provide visitors with a logical map of how your content is structured, whereas XML sitemaps contain code that only search engine bots can understand. Although search engines like Google can index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Configure Your Site’s 404 Error Page
When visitors searching for your site type in the wrong web address or click on a hyperlink pointing to a page on your website that no longer exists, they are greeted with a 404 page …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found page)
A 404 Not Found page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found 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 System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then to automatically drive more web traffic is post new content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different components and web properties …
(WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of skills and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many website developers a long time to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as you can. This step is addressed in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Three
To continue reading, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive tutorial series aimed at helping business owners learn how to grow their business online cost-effectively and drive traffic sustainably with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven web marketing methods.
Would You Like To Get Automatically Notified When New WordPress Tutorials Get Published? Then Subscribe To This Site!
***
"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
***