Welcome to Part Three of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your website using WordPress.
In Part 1 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 website or blog, all you have to do to generate web traffic is post fresh content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we discussed critical setup decisions. 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 site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this article, we look at the configuration phase of the traffic system. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site so you can ensure that web traffic will automatically start flowing as you start adding new content on your site.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. With competition becoming increasingly more difficult businesses are researching every opportunity they can to get better results online.
Having the ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous advantage. An expertly configured website gives your business an immediate advantage from the word “go”.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
There is a significant 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 its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to understand the differences:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special type of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing story.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
All is going fine in the widget-making factory when things suddenly cease working.
As no one can figure out what is wrong, the plant manager decides to call in an expert.
Promptly after arriving, the expert walks immediately towards the main control box. After staring at the wiring board for no more than 2 minutes, the expert then takes out a tiny hammer from his tool box and makes a very gentle tap about 3 cm from the right side of the control unit.
Immediately, every machine in the workshop springs back to life.
The floor manager is greatly relieved as he thanks the expert, who leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a request for payment of $5,000.
With great anger, the manager calls the expert. Demanding to know why the expert has charged them so much for less than five minutes work, he then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives and is placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the plant stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one on the factory floor was able to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to be compensated fairly for investing years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to quickly assess and avert a very serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WP site fully configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and search engines, social media and dozens of other web 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 driving traffic to your site?)
Although the solution to many challenges often seems quite easy in hindsight, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring some of the site settings for clients. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which 3rd-party services you need to set up and activate to achieve desired outcomes
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured in order to ensure that everything functions the way you expect, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This stage of the WordPress traffic automation system is not so technically difficult, but it’s quite complicated. It’s not as easy as installing a piece of software, tweaking some settings in your dashboard area or clicking a button … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration stage is a process that involves your web server, your website or blog, and a number of third-party sites or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart of the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these steps in more detail.
Configuring The Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your hosting account for website installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings and options in your web server that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your business can attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like configuring server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess and 404 redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been checked and configured, the next step is to set up and configure various third-party sites and online services.
External Sites
The basic concept of choosing external sites is that all of your content should be posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, radiate outwards to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you incorporate these external sites into your traffic system, content with links pointing back to your site will get automatically fed to these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social networks, even to users of the platform itself. Your content receives increased exposure online, helping your business tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some external web properties and online solutions will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress settings to help speed up the process 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 site’s settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmasters)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with essential information, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your account has been with Google have been set up, the details can be used with traffic settings in WordPress 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, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account has been set up, visitor tracking information can be added to all web pages in WordPress via plugins used with other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your account and site details with Bing are set up, you can use this information to integrate and automate web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress offers users the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to grow a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your web traffic generation system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need your various social 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 pages and bring new visitors to your site.
You should have pages set up with all the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose the ones that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we will cover some of these tools in greater detail further below and during the Automation phase).
(There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging web platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different user types.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add an RSS feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute social content to social networks)
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 RebelMouse account.
There are various solutions you can incorporate into your traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore some of these further and discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
Global WordPress Settings
The WordPress admin area contains a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains an important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Section)
As stated below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have intentionally chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services box
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of all the update services you want to notify as soon as you publish a new post 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
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 of displaying the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could affect 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 a partial feed, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Typically, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to instantly notify all the update services you have listed in the Update Services area whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion
Although the settings in this section 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings enable your site to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks Screen)
The examples below show some of the ways permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring permalinks)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, see this tutorial: Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs
WP Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your website, including many plugins that 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 website for handling 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 simply cannot afford to ignore the importance of securing your site.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and botnets.
Go here for more details:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website …
(SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index, it allows you to configure how your content will show up in 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 your site provides content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins.
Many social sharing plugins let you choose 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 shares), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which users can unlock by sharing your page.
WP Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, some themes also include built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site linking structure for faster indexing, easily add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing features to your site is as easy as clicking a few buttons and enabling the function …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
Other Configuration Aspects For Your WordPress Site
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle good and unwelcome traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of business online, it’s important that your site stays compliant with government laws and regulations.
(Is Your Site Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article on adding legal pages to WordPress here:
Post Categories And Tags
Categories and tags help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.
(WordPress post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s SEO.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s tags and categories should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Process.
When looking at ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post categories and tags have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits and results.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
A site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools discover your online content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, while an XML sitemap is mostly code that only search engines can understand. 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 results in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – A Source Of Lost Traffic Opportunities!
When visitors type in the wrong URL into their web browser or click on a dead link, they will typically be greeted with a 404 Not Found page …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
A 404 Not Found page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your server, there are plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your website or blog has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you then need to do to automatically generate traffic is add content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different components and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration process typically takes some web developers a long time to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is addressed in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read more, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of an tutorial series aimed at helping site owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively and drive traffic organically with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven web marketing strategies.
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