Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic generation machine using WordPress.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically generate more web traffic is publish fresh content regularly!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase of the blueprint. 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 existing site was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we will look at the configuration stage of the traffic system. We will show you how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that new web traffic will automatically start flowing just by adding content on a consistent basis to your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. Businesses are becoming ever more competitive on a global scale and are researching every opportunity they can to improve their performance online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous advantage over other competitors. An expertly configured WordPress site gives your business an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
The Configuration Phase Is What Makes All The Difference
There is a significant 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 take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s one way to explain the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special type of expertise.
Allow me to illustrate this point with a little story.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
Things were humming along in the widget assembly plant when everything suddenly ground to a halt.
As no one could figure out what happened, the plant manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Soon afterward, the expert arrived and headed immediately towards the main control box. After staring silently at the wiring board for less than 3 minutes, the expert then took out a teeny-weeny little hammer from his tool box and made a very gentle tap near the left side of the unit.
Immediately, everything returned to normal.
The plant manager was greatly relieved as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the manager received a request for payment of $5,000.
The factory manager called the expert, demanding to know why he had charged them such an exorbitant fee for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of work and then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrived and was placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive new visitors to their sites.
How much money did the widget plant stand to lose when the machines stopped working and no one in the factory floor was able to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have every right to demand fair compensation for investing years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to immediately assess and fix a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your WordPress website or blog fully configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other online properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your website?)
While many experts often make difficult situations and problems look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to work things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than installing a website and configuring a few settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install to get various functionalities on your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts need to be set up and activated to get desired outcomes
- Which settings need to be configured to make sure things will function as expected, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this part of the traffic automation system may not seem so technically difficult, it can be quite complicated. It’s not as simple as installing one or two plugins, tweaking some options and settings in your dashboard area … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of many parts such as your web hosting server, your website, and various third-party sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If we create a simplified flowchart showing all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at these areas in more detail.
Configuring Your Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your hosting account for site installation purposes. What we are talking about, is configuring settings and options in your server that affect how your website will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your web hosting account settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic your website may attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for good and bad traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include things like integrating server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step is to configure various external sites.
Integration With External Sites
The idea behind setting up external sites is that all content is published from a central location (your site) and from there, it gets distributed automatically to other parts of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you add these external sites to your configuration, content linking back to your site will be automatically fed to search, social and aggregator sites. Your business will benefit from added exposure online, helping your business tap into a new audience and traffic source.
Some of the third-party web properties and online solutions will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site’s settings to 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 settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmasters)
Google Webmasters lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of important information, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account and site details with Google have been set up, the information can be used with web traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s traffic results, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrals, etc.
After setting up your account, visitor tracking information can be added to WordPress using a simple Google Analytics plugin and and sent to many other useful applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account is set up, your information can be used with traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress provides users with the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your automated traffic generation system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site)
You will need your social media and social bookmarking accounts set up before you can 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 and social bookmarking accounts and bring new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have set up accounts and profiles with all of the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are many social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(You can syndicate your content to lots of social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online platforms and content aggregators that can serve as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add an RSS feed from your WordPress site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your RebelMouse social feed.
There are many different solutions that can be incorporated into your own 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 external services, it’s time to configure WordPress.
Configuring Your WordPress Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that your 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 menu that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains an important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As stated below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the list of services entered into the Update Services field
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section lists only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section and WordPress takes care of the rest …
(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
This section affects how your content gets seen by readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could affect 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.
As far as your traffic system is concerned, however, the most important setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables your site to ping various update services whenever new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion
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 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings enable your site to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the ways permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring post permalinks)
We have written a detailed tutorial on using permalinks here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality to your site, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can improve traffic generation
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for dealing with the effects of 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, you cannot ignore the importance of website security.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and botnets.
To learn more, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(WP SEO Plugin – Yoast SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index, it also lets you specify how to display your content in 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 boost traffic to your site, especially if your site provides content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
There are many free or inexpensive social sharing plugins to choose from.
Most social share plugins let you specify which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your pages which users can unlock by liking your page.
Configuring WordPress Traffic Generation Theme Features
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, some themes also give you built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes can be configured for better traffic results)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your site is as easy as clicking a few buttons to enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Other Configuration Features For WordPress
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you are making money online, it’s important that your site is found to comply with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, see this article:
WordPress Tags & Categories
WordPress categories & tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your website.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your pages.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and categories should be reviewed and set up during the Website Planning Stages.
When considering ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s categories and tags have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits and results.
A Site Map Of Your Pages and Posts
A site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools find your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same 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 bots can interpret. Although search engines like Google can index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
Don’t Forget Your WordPress 404 Page
When online visitors enter the wrong URL or click on a hyperlink pointing to a destination on your site that no longer exists, they will normally be greeted with an error – page not found message …
(A 404 Not Found error page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up on your web server, there are several plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do to automatically start driving traffic is publish web content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of various elements and external web properties …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration phase of the traffic automation process can take some web professionals 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 3
To continue reading this article, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively and drive traffic automatically using a WordPress-driven website and proven online marketing strategies.
Get Notified When New WordPress Tutorials Are Published – Subscribe Using The Form Below!
***
"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com
***