Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated web traffic generating machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to attract more traffic is post content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase. We explained the best way to start 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 website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this section, we look at the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. We explain what makes an expertly configured site different than a professionally configured one. You will also understand just what type of work needs to be done to ensure that when all is set up and fully configured, you will begin bringing new visitors automatically whenever you publish fresh content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Also, the business landscape is becoming increasingly more competitive and businesses are researching any and every opportunity they can to increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand is a tremendous competitive advantage. An expertly configured WordPress site gives your business a significant competitive advantage from the very beginning.
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 website-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here is a simple way to describe the difference:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence plus an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does it take additional labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special kind of expertise.
Allow me to illustrate this with a little story.
Knowing Where To Tap
All is going just fine in the widget-making factory when everything suddenly ceases working.
No one can figure out what went wrong and so the plant manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
The expert arrives soon afterward and, without saying a word, walks immediately towards the main control box. After staring at the wires and circuitry for about 5 minutes, the expert then produces a little hammer and makes a gentle tap about one cm from the right edge of the box.
Immediately, all the machinery returns to normal.
The floor manager is greatly overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the manager receives a request for payment of $5,000.
Feeling angry, the manager dials the expert. Why have they had been charged such an exorbitant fee for less than 5 minutes work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving visitors 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 in the business had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to be compensated fairly for years spent acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a website configured so all you had to do is publish new content and search engines, social sites and dozens of other traffic-generating online properties would be automatically 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?)
While many experts often make complex situations and problems look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to work things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install to get certain functionalities on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up to achieve desired outcomes
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure in order to ensure that everything will function exactly as you expect, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this part of the traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite involved. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing a plugin, clicking on a button or two, or tweaking some settings in your admin area … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration stage is a process that involves your web hosting server, your website or blog, and a number of external sites …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart of the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Configuring Your Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is tweaking settings in your web server that affect how your website will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic your business will attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like integrating spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of third-party sites.
Configuring External Services
The purpose of adding external sites is that all of your content is posted to one central location (your site) and from there, it radiates outwards automatically to other parts of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After incorporating these external services into your network, content pointing back to your site will get automatically published on search, social and aggregator accounts. Your site receives added exposure online, helping your business tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of these web properties and online services will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress settings 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 settings:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmasters)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with useful data, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your account with Google, use this information with 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 performance, SEO, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data have been set up, you can add tracking information to WordPress via any of several Google Analytics plugins and feed data automatically to many other useful applications and web properties.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account, you can use the information to automate web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) 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 option if you plan to build a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your traffic system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need your social accounts set up in order to integrate these with 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.
Make sure you have set up accounts and profile pages with all of the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick the ones that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(You can post your content to loads of social bookmarking sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of emerging web platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different users.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add an RSS feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your social feed.
There are many different solutions you can incorporate into your traffic system. Please feel free to 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 external service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring WordPress Settings
Your WordPress admin 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 influence your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Section)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains an important and often overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As described 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 intentionally chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services text area
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can 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 will do 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
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 have an influence web traffic. For example, your choice to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could impact 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 a partial feed, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as traffic is concerned, however, the most important setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to instantly notify various update services when new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings Screen)
Here are some of the ways your search-friendly URLS can be configured …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
To learn more about setting up WordPress permalinks, see this tutorial: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring WordPress Traffic Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to bring more visitors to your site
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, web security is something you cannot afford to ignore.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to botnet and hacker attacks.
To learn more, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your website more search engine friendly …
(WP Plugins For SEO – Yoast SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google to find, classify and index, it also lets you configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with their social networks can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
You can add social features to your website easily using WordPress plugins.
Many social plugins allow you to specify which social 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 followers), etc. Some plugins even allow you to protect content 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 can help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, some themes also give you built-in options for improving SEO and site linking structure for faster indexing, add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes allow you to configure settings for better traffic results)
With many themes, adding social sharing features to your pages is as easy as clicking a few buttons to configure your settings and enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic Automation – Additional Configuration Areas
Last but not least in the web traffic configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you do any kind of business online, you need to ensure that your website is compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Comply With The Law?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, see this article:
Post Categories & Tags
WordPress tags & categories help search engines better classify and index your web pages, which helps to increase traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your website.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to discuss and set up your site’s post tags and post categories during the Website Planning Phase.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s tags and categories have been correctly set up to deliver optimal results.
A Site Map Of Your Pages and Posts
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools find your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, whereas an XML sitemap is code that only search bots can interpret. Although search engines like Google can index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Page – A Source Of Lost Traffic Opportunities!
When online users type in the wrong web address or click on an invalid link, they are greeted with an error – page not found message …
(Default WordPress 404 Error Page)
A 404 Not Found error page can redirect confused visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error page can be set up in your web server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your website has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do to automatically attract new traffic is add content consistently.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of different components and web properties …
(WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise required to perform this process can take many website professionals a long time to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is addressed in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Part 3
To continue reading about this topic, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials aimed at helping business owners learn how to grow their business online cost-effectively and drive traffic automatically using a WordPress-powered website and proven marketing strategies that are easy to implement.
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