Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is publish content on a regular basis to start generating web traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on 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 website, and what to do if your website was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will discuss the configuration phase of this process. We explain how to configure a WordPress site to start bringing visitors automatically whenever you publish fresh content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With competition becoming increasingly more difficult businesses are researching every advantage they can that can help you increase their competitiveness online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand is a tremendous competitive advantage. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website allows their business to get off with a flying start as soon as their website 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 a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here’s one way to explain the main difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does it take additional work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special type of expertise.
Let me illustrate this point with a joke.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
All was going according to schedule in the gizmo plant when everything ground to a sudden halt.
As no one could figure out what happened, the plant manager decided to call in an expert.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrived and headed immediately towards the main control box. After staring at the electronic components for less than 2 minutes, the expert then took out a little hammer from his shirt pocket and made a gentle tap near the top-left side of the control unit.
Immediately, everything began to work again.
The plant manager was overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the manager received an invoice for $5,000.
The manager picked up the phone and called the expert, demanding to know why they were expected to pay so much for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice arrived in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic consistently to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when the machines stopped functioning and no one in the business was able to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to demand fair compensation for investing years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to quickly fix a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress web site fully configured so all you have to do is publish new content and search engines, social followers from sites like Facebook and Twitter and dozens of other traffic-generating web properties would be instantly 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 driving traffic to your site?)
While the solution to many problems often seems ridiculously easy in hindsight, it rarely is that simple or easy when you try to figure things out.
Expertly configuring 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 like:
- Which programs you need to install to add certain functionalities to your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts you need to set up to achieve specific results
- Which settings need to be configured in order to ensure that everything will function as envisioned, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this part of the traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite complicated. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing a plugin, clicking a button … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration phase is a complex process that involves your web hosting server, your WP site, and various third-party sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at these areas in more detail.
Web Server Configuration
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). We’re talking about tweaking settings in your server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your webhosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic your website will attract will be unwanted 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 unwelcome traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like integrating server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been checked and configured (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of external sites and services.
External Sites And Solutions – Configuration
The purpose of adding external sites is that all of your content is posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it syndicates automatically to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external platforms have been added to your network, content pointing back to your site is automatically posted to search, social and aggregator accounts. Your site receives additional exposure online, helping your business tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of the sites and services will need to have accounts 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 Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of important data, tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account, your details can be used to automate traffic settings and notifications 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 efforts, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrals, etc.
After setting up your up your account and site data has been entered, you can add traffic monitoring information to WordPress via a plugin and feed data automatically to many other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account and site details have been set up, you can use your details to integrate and automate web traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you are planning 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 these features into your automated web traffic system in Part Four of this series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need your social media and social bookmarking 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 and social bookmarking accounts and bring new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have pages set up with all the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick those that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(You can syndicate your content to many social bookmarking sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online web platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary 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 an RSS feed from your WordPress site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your page.
There are many different sites and platforms that can be added to your own web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, 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 WordPress settings.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
Global Settings
Your WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains an important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As described below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically configured your site settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the list of services entered into the Update Services field
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is available …
(Writing Settings – WordPress Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress – just add a list of update services to this section …
(You can 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 visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your site 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 feature is enabled or not.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to automatically ping various update services when new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Section)
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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings enable WordPress to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings Screen)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your permalink URLs …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
We have written a detailed tutorial on using permalinks in WordPress here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
WordPress Traffic Plugin Settings – Configuration
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No website is safe from a cyber attack.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to attacks from hackers and bots.
Go here for more info:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your website more search engine friendly …
(WP SEO Plugin – Yoast SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO can significantly improve your SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index, it also lets you specify how to present your content in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with their social networks can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins to choose from.
Many social share plugins let you choose 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 sections on your pages which visitors can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Configuring Settings – WordPress Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, many themes also give you options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) include built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing features to your website is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Configuring Other WordPress Areas
Last (but by no means least) in the traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and bad traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of business online, you need to ensure that your website complies with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, go here:
Post Categories & Tags
Post categories & post tags help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.
(Categories help search engines index your pages, which improves traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s categories and tags should be discussed and set up during the Website Planning Process.
When considering ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s tags and categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal benefits and results.
Add A Site Map
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites discover your online content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. Although Google can index your site just from an XML sitemap (which plugins 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.
Your WordPress 404 Page Not Found
When visitors searching online for your website enter the wrong web address or click on a hyperlink pointing to a page on your site that no longer exists, they will typically be greeted with an error – page not found message (known as a 404 error page) …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your server, there are several WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your website or blog has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then to automatically drive traffic is add fresh content regularly.
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 System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take many web professionals months 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 article in our series.
This is the end of Section Three
To keep 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 cost-effectively with a WordPress-powered website and proven online marketing strategies.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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