Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this article series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is add fresh content consistently to automatically begin attracting new web traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase of the blueprint. We helped you understand 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 was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will discuss the configuration phase of the WordPress traffic automation system. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site so you can begin driving new traffic automatically whenever you post fresh content on your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With business becoming ever more competitive, it’s worth looking into every advantage that can help you get better results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand is a tremendous advantage over the competition. For WordPress users, an expertly configured website means having an immediate advantage from the word “go”.
The Configuration Phase Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here’s a simple way to describe the difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only is extra work required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special type of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing little story.
Knowing Where To Tap
All was going well in the widget plant when everything came to a sudden stop.
No one could figure out what happened and so the floor manager decided to call in an expert to fix the problem.
The expert arrived shortly afterwards and went directly to the control box. After staring silently at the wiring diagrams for 5 minutes, the expert then took out a teensy-weensy little hammer from his tool box and made a very gentle tap about one inch from the left edge of the control unit.
Immediately, everything sprang back to life.
The manager was delighted as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager received a request for payment of $5,000.
The factory manager rang back the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged such a large amount of money for less than 5 minutes work. He promptly 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 being able to drive new visitors to their sites.
How much money did the widget plant stand to lose when production stopped functioning 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 the right to get paid fairly for years spent acquiring the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to quickly avert a very serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a blog configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and search engines, social networking sites 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 driving traffic to your site?)
While the solution to many problems is often ridiculously simple in hindsight, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few internal settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install to get desired functionalities on your site.
- Which services you need to set up and activate to achieve specific results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured to ensure that things will work as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this part of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite involved. The reason why is because it’s not just about installing and configuring a piece of software, tweaking some settings in your admin area … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration phase involves the integration of many components including your web hosting server, your web site, and a number of external sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If we try to flowchart the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing all the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these areas in more detail.
Configuring Your Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings and options in your server specifically for handling web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your web hosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic you will attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include things like spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of external sites.
External Accounts
The concept behind choosing external sites is that all of your content will be posted to one central location (your site) and from there, it will get distributed automatically to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you add these external services to your setup, content linked back to your website is automatically added to these platforms. Your content and site will be given exposure to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some external web properties and online services will need to have accounts 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 before configuring your site’s settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Search Console lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with useful data, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your account with Google, the information can be used to integrate and automate web traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic results, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site details are set up, traffic tracking information can be integrated with WordPress via a plugin and and sent to 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. Once your account and site data with Bing are set up, this information can be used with web traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to build a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your web traffic system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your various social media accounts 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 and social bookmarking accounts and bring new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have set up accounts with all the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can You can post your content to many social sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just select the ones that will work with your system and/or content syndication tools (we discuss some of these tools in greater detail in the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to lots of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add a feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your RebelMouse page.
There are many different sites and platforms you can add to your web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up third-party site accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
Configuring Your WordPress Site
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
By default, your WordPress dashboard area includes a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and often overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings)
As described in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have intentionally 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 text box
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section displays only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(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 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 a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could play a part in someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your site to get 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 in this section as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to instantly ping various update services when new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unchecked …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
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 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks Section)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
To learn more about setting up permalinks in WordPress, refer to this step-by-step tutorial: Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks
WordPress Traffic Plugins – Configuration
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality to your website, 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
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No blog is completely safe from being attacked by hackers.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to hackers and bots.
More info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your website more search engine friendly …
(SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your website’s SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find, crawl and index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content with members of their online communities can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you post content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social features to your website using WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social plugins let you specify which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which users can unlock by liking your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings For Traffic Generation
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, some themes also provide options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a free theme) can be configured for improved traffic results)
With many themes, adding social sharing features to your site is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons and enabling the feature …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Additional Configuration Steps For WordPress
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you do business online (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your site is compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate online business practices.
(Is Your Website Legally Compliant?)
If you need help understanding how to quickly and easily add legal pages to your WordPress website, go here:
Post Categories And Tags
WordPress tags & post categories help to improve your site’s search optimization, which improves traffic.
(Categories help search engines index your web pages, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s post categories and tags should be set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
When considering ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s tags and categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal benefits and results.
HTML Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications find more of your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although search engines like Google can index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – A Source Of Lost Traffic Opportunities!
When visitors searching online for your website enter the wrong web address into their web browser or click on a dead link, they are greeted with an error page (known as a 404 page) …
(Default WordPress 404 Not Found page)
A 404 Not Found page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up in your server, there are several plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your website or blog has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you then have to do is post fresh content consistently to start generating traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different elements and web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take many web professionals months 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 covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help you learn how to grow your business online and drive traffic organically with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven marketing methods that are easy to implement.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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