Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this series, we described 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 to automatically start attracting traffic is add web content regularly!)
In Part 2, we looked at critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration stage of the traffic automation process. We will show you how to configure a WordPress site to automatically drive visitors just by regularly publishing new content on your web site.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Businesses are becoming ever more competitive worldwide and are researching any and every advantage they can to improve their performance and results online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a huge advantage over the competition. For business owners, having an expertly configured website means having an immediate advantage from the very start.
The Configuration Process Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here is a simple way to explain the main difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does it take more labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
All is moving along in the gizmo workshop when everything suddenly stops.
No one can figure out what is wrong and so the manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Soon afterward, the expert arrives and immediately heads to the main control box. After staring silently at the box for 5 minutes, the expert then produces a tiny little hammer and makes a single tap near the top-left side of the box.
Immediately, everything springs back to life.
The plant manager is filled with joy as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager receives a request of payment for services totalling $5,000.
Bewildered to the point of feeling outrage, the factory manager calls the expert. Why had they had been charged so much for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work? He then requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives and is placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive new visitors to their sites.
How much money did the factory stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one in the factory floor had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have every right to be compensated fairly for having spent years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to immediately repair a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your WordPress website set up so all you had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other web properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your website?)
While the solution to many problems can seem quite simple in hindsight, it rarely is that simple or easy when you try to work things out.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than installing a website and configuring a few settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install to get various functionalities on your site.
- Which third-party services need to be set up to achieve certain results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured in order to make sure everything functions as you have imagined, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite complicated. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing and configuring a plugin, clicking on a button or two … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration phase is a process that involves your web hosting server, your website or blog, and a number of third-party sites and online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If the activities involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved in more detail.
Configuring The Web Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your server specifically for handling web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your website can attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been fine-tuned and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of third-party sites or online services.
Configuring External Services
The basic concept of setting up external sites is that all content gets posted to one central location (your site) and from there, it gets distributed automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After adding these external platforms to your setup, content linking back to your site will be automatically fed to these platforms. Your website will be given additional exposure to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some third-party sites will need to be set up before configuring your settings to help save time and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts before configuring your settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with useful information, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your account and entering site details, this information can be used 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 website’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your up your account and entered your site data, traffic tracking information can be added to WordPress via a simple Google Analytics plugin used with other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your Bing Webmaster Tools account, you can use your details to integrate and automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress offers users a self-hosted (WordPress.org) and a hosted (WordPress.com) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your automated traffic system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and attract new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social media accounts set up in order to integrate these with your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and attract 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 loads of social bookmarking 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 well with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(There are lots of social sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, 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 accounts, 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 an 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 sites and platforms that can be incorporated into your traffic system. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up external service accounts, it’s time to configure your site.
Configuring Your WordPress Site
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 areas.
Global Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most powerful and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Area)
As described in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely configured your settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of update services entered into the Update Services field
By default, this section includes only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(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 your content gets seen by visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s decision 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 here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.
Generally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to instantly ping various update services when a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings)
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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s post permalinks …
(Configuring permalinks)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, go here: Setting Up WordPress Permalinks
WP Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that can add just about every kind of functionality to your website, including traffic generation.
Let’s look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that affect traffic generation
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No website or blog is immune from cyberattacks.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
More info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(SEO plugins help increase traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to find and index, it also lets you specify how to present your content in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with free or inexpensive plugins.
Most social share plugins allow you to 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 shares), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your pages which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring Settings – Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring design and layout aspects of your website, some themes also give you built-in options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a free theme) allow you to configure settings and options for better traffic results)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons to your content is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons to configure your options and enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic System Configuration – Additional Things To Consider
Last but not least in the web traffic system configuration process, are the components that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Compliance Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you make money online (or plan to), it’s important that your site is compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business online.
(Is Your Website Compliant?)
For a detailed article about why it’s important to have a legally compliant website, see this article:
WordPress Tags & Post Categories
Categories and post tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better classify and index your web pages.
(Categories help search engines index your pages, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s tags and categories should be set up during the Website Planning Process.
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 benefits.
Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites discover more of your site’s 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 two different things. Only search engines can read XML sitemaps. Although Google can index your site 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 can result in increased traffic.
404 Page – An Additional Source Of Traffic!
When visitors searching online for your website type in the wrong URL or click on a dead link, they will normally be presented with a 404 page …
(A WordPress 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up in your web server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your website or blog expertly configured and fully set up, all you then have to do to automatically start generating new traffic is post fresh content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of skills and expertise required to perform this stage of the traffic automation process can take some website professionals months to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is covered in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read more, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help site owners learn how to grow their business using a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven web marketing methods.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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