Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your website into an automated traffic machine using WordPress.
In Part 1 of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to begin bringing new web traffic is publish new content regularly!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase. We helped you understand 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 where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we look at the configuration phase of the WordPress traffic automation system. You will learn why an expertly configured WordPress site is different from a professionally configured one. You will also understand how much work is required to make sure that when all is fully configured, you can automatically start to get visitors when you begin to add content to your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With competition becoming progressively tougher businesses are exploring any opportunity they can to get better results online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge advantage over other competitors. With an expertly configured WordPress site, your business has an immediate competitive advantage from the very start.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website 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 is a simple way to explain the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only are more steps required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special type of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this here is a joke.
Knowing Where To Tap
Everything is going just fine in the gizmo assembly line when things suddenly stop working.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert walks straight towards the control box. After staring at the board for what seems like 5 minutes, the expert then produces a teensy-weensy hammer from his pocket and makes a single tap near the right corner of the box.
Immediately, all machinery in the factory floor begins to work once again.
The plant manager is greatly overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager receives a bill for $5,000.
With great anger, the factory manager calls the expert. Why did he charge them such a ridiculously high fee for so little time spent delivering such minimal amount of work? He then 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 #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when the equipment stopped working and no one in the factory floor was able to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to demand fair compensation for having invested years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to quickly assess and avert a very serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your website fully set up so all you have to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other online properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
Although the solution to many challenges often seems ridiculously easy once implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than installing a website and configuring a few settings. It involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which services you need to set up and activate to achieve certain outcomes
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure in order to ensure that things will function as planned, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This part of the traffic automation system is not so technically challenging, but it’s quite involved and complicated. This is because it’s not as easy as installing and configuring a piece of software, clicking a couple of buttons, or tweaking some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of different components such as your web server, your site, and various external sites and online services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If we try to flowchart all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic diagram of the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these areas in more detail.
Configuring The Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes. What we are talking about, is configuring settings and options in your web hosting account that affect how your website will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your website can attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for both bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like server-level spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirections, etc?)
After your web server settings have been fine-tuned and configured (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of third-party sites and online services.
Configuring External Services
The basic idea of setting up external sites is that all of your content should be posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will get syndicated automatically to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After adding these external platforms to your traffic system, content linking back to your site is automatically syndicated to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and business will be given exposure to a new audience and source of traffic.
Some of these sites and online services 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, here are just some of the accounts you will need to have set up before configuring your WordPress site’s settings:
Google Webmasters
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmasters lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with essential information, tools and reports about your website.
After setting up your account, you can use this information with 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 performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, you can add traffic monitoring information to all of your web pages in WordPress via a simple plugin and feed data automatically to many other online applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with 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 integrate and automate traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress provides users with a self-hosted (WordPress.org) and a hosted (WordPress.com) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to build a professional online presence for your business.
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 this into your automated web traffic generation system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and attract new traffic to your site)
You will need your social accounts set up in order to 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 sites and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site.
You should have accounts and profiles with all the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can set up. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick those that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(You can post your content to lots of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online web platforms and content aggregators that can act as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free levels, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add a feed from your site …
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 users can follow your website.
There are various solutions that can be added to your own traffic blueprint. 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 server settings and set up accounts with third-party sites, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
WordPress Settings
Your WordPress admin area contains a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most powerful and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Section)
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 purposely chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services section
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section contains only one entry …
(Writing Settings – Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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
***
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 of displaying the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds 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 website 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 main setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to instantly ping various update services when new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Section)
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 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)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the options for configuring your permalink URLs …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
If you need help setting up WP permalinks, go here: Changing WordPress Permalinks
Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add just about every type of functionality to your site, including traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to increase traffic
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you cannot afford to ignore the importance of securing your web sites.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to attacks from hackers and botnets.
More info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving improving the way search engines like Google find, classify and index your website …
(WordPress SEO Plugin – Yoast SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index, it also gives you control over how your content is presented to Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can add social sharing to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins.
Many social share plugins let you select 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 likes), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
Configuring Settings – WP Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that 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 give you options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With many themes, adding social sharing buttons to your website is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic Automation – Additional Configuration Areas
Last (but by no means least) in the WordPress traffic system configuration process, are the things that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can hurt your business as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you engage in any form of business online, you need to ensure that your site complies with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business practices online.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, go here:
Tags & Categories
WordPress tags and categories help search engines better classify and index your website, which helps to increase traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your website.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s categories and tags should be reviewed and set up 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 pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites discover your web content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. Although search engines like Google will index your site just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Page – Don’t Forget This!
When online users type in the wrong web address into their browser or click on links pointing to pages on your site that no longer exist, they will normally be presented with a 404 Not Found error page …
(A 404 Not Found error page)
A 404 Error Page can be configured to funnel visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up in your web server, there are plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do then is add new content on a consistent basis to automatically begin bringing new web traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of various components and external web properties …
(WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take some web developers a long time to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is addressed in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Section Three
To keep reading about this topic, click on the link below:
This article is part of an article series designed to help site owners learn how to grow their business online with a WordPress website and proven online marketing strategies.
Subscribe To WPCompendium.org And Get Notified Of New Tutorials!
***
"Learning WordPress has been a huge stumbling block for me. I've been looking for something that covers absolutely everything but doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Thank you so much ... you have just provided me with what I have been looking for! Truly appreciated!" - Tanya
***