Welcome to Part Three of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic generation machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is publish great content on a consistent basis to automatically start generating new traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we will discuss the configuration stage of this process. You will learn how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that web traffic will automatically start flowing as you begin publishing content to your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as their greatest challenge online. Also, the business landscape is becoming so much more competitive and businesses are exploring every opportunity they can to get better results online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a huge advantage. For business owners, having an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start as soon as their site is launched.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website developer 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 professional web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does it take more labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with an anecdote.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
All was going fine in the widget assembly plant when suddenly, all equipment came to a complete stop.
No one could figure out what has gone wrong and so the plant manager decided to call in an expert.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrived and, without saying a word, immediately went to the main control box. After staring silently at the schematics for about 3 minutes, the expert then produced a teeny-weeny hammer and made a very gentle tap near the bottom-right side of the box.
Immediately, the machinery began to work once more.
The plant manager was greatly overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the manager received a request for payment of services rendered for $5,000.
The manager dialled the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged so much for so little time spent delivering such minimal amount of work. He then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrived in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive web traffic to their sites.
How much money did the widget factory stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one in the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to ask to be compensated fairly for years spent acquiring the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to assess and fix a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your site fully configured so all you had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social networking sites and dozens of other web properties would be immediately 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 the solution to many problems is often quite simple once implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few internal settings. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which plugins you need to install to add specific functionalities to your site.
- Which 3rd-party services need to be set up to get desired outcomes
- Which settings need to be configured to ensure that things work as expected, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This part of the traffic automation system is not technically difficult, but it’s quite involved. This is because it’s not as easy as installing one or two plugins, clicking a button … it’s all this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a complex process that involves your web server, your site, and various third-party sites and online services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified flowchart of the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Configuring Your Web Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for site installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is configuring settings and options in your web-hosting account that affect how your site will handle all web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your webhosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your site can attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like configuring spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess and error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
Once your server settings have been checked and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of external sites.
External Services
The idea behind setting up external sites is that all of your content will get published from a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will be automatically distributed to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external platforms have been added to your network, content with links pointing back to your site will get automatically fed to search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and business will then receive additional exposure online, helping your business tap into new sources of traffic.
Some of these sites and services will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress site to 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:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Search Console lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of essential data, SEO tools and reports about your website.
After setting up your account with Google Webmasters, use your details to automate web traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account has been set up, traffic tracking code can be added to all web pages in WordPress via plugins 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 Webmaster Tools. Once your account and site data with Bing have been set up, this information can be used to automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers users 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 for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great 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 automated web traffic generation system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your social media accounts 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 sites and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have pages set up with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(You can syndicate your content to loads of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online technology platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different user types.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your page.
There are various solutions that can be added to your own traffic system. 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 web server and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website
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.
Global WordPress Settings
By default, all WordPress installations include a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains an important and often overlooked traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Screen)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely configured your settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping 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)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section …
(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 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 influence web traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could play a part in 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 a partial feed, 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 checkbox is ticked or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to ping the update services list whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
Discussion
Although this section is mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow your site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the ways search-friendly URLS can be configured …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
To learn more about setting up WordPress permalinks, see this tutorial: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring Settings – WP Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that can add just about every kind of functionality to your website, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you simply cannot afford to ignore the importance of securing your websites.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to botnet and hacker attacks.
For more information, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website …
(WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive more traffic by improving your website’s ability to rank better in search engines)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO. 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 specify how to display your content to Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with their friends and members of their social networks can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
You can easily add social features to your site using WordPress plugins.
Most social plugins let you specify which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WordPress Traffic Theme Settings – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, some themes also provide built-in features that let you improve SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) include built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons to your website is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons to configure your options and enable the function …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Other Areas To Configure
Last but not least in the web traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you are making money online (or plan to), you need to make sure that your website complies with government laws and regulations.
(Is Your Site Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article on how to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your site here:
WordPress Post Categories And Tags
WordPress tags & post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search engine optimization.
(WordPress post categories help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s tags and categories should be set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Process.
When configuring your web site to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the categories and tags that have been set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications find your web content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. Only search engine bots can read XML sitemaps. Although search engines like Google can index your site just using 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 can result in increased traffic.
Your 404 Error Page
When visitors searching online for your site enter the wrong URL or click on links pointing to an incorrect destination on your website, they will typically be presented with an error page …
(A 404 Not Found page)
A 404 page can be turned into a useful source of traffic 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 in your web server, there are several WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your website fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then is post great content regularly to start generating more web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of different elements and web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some web professionals months to acquire.
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 covered in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Section Three
To continue reading this article, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online and drive traffic organically with a WordPress-powered website and proven marketing methods that are easy to implement.
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