Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is add web content consistently to begin bringing web traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase of the automation process. 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 website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic blueprint. We will show you what makes an expertly configured site different from a professionally configured site. You will also understand what type of work is required to ensure that when everything is set up and configured, you can automatically get traffic as you begin to publish content to your site.
WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as one of their greatest challenges online. Businesses are becoming increasingly more competitive and are looking for every opportunity they can to increase their competitiveness online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous advantage over the competition. An expertly configured WordPress site gives your business a flying start and a significant advantage online.
The Configuration Phase Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site 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 understand the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a 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 a whole lot more labor 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 a little story.
Knowing Where To Tap
Everything was going just fine in the gizmo-making manufacturing plant when all of a sudden, production stopped.
No one could figure out what happened and so the manager decided to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert headed out immediately to the control box. After staring silently at the control unit for no more than 2 minutes, the expert then took out a tiny hammer and made a single tap near the left side of the control unit.
Immediately, all the machinery in the workshop started working once more.
The manager was delighted as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the factory manager received a request for payment of $5,000.
The factory manager called the expert, demanding to know why the expert had charged them such an exorbitant fee for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrived in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic consistently to their sites.
How much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one in the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to ask to be compensated fairly for having invested years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and fix a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a site configured so all you had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other web 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 driving traffic to your site?)
While the solution to many challenges is often quite easy once it’s been implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than just installing a website and configuring some basic settings. It involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed to get specific functionalities on your site.
- Which services you need to set up and activate to achieve desired outcomes
- Which settings you need to configure to ensure that everything will work to plan, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not so technically challenging, but it’s quite involved and complicated. This is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring one or two plugins, clicking on a button or two, 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 a number of different components such as your web hosting server, your site, and a number of external sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If we try to flowchart the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at these areas in more detail.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for website installation purposes (this should have been 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 all 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 welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic your website can attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage 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 can include things like spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, setting up 404 error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirections, etc?)
After your server settings have been checked and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of external sites.
3rd-Party Sites Integration
The concept behind choosing external sites is that all of your content is published from a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it radiates outwards automatically to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external sites have been added to your network, content with links pointing back to your site will be automatically added to these platforms, indexed by search engines and distributed to social sites, even to users of the platform itself. Your content and site will be given added exposure to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some external sites will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site’s settings to speed up the configuration 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 settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Search Console)
Google Search Console lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with essential data, SEO tools and reports about your website.
After setting up your account with Google Search Console, use this information with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic results, SEO, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
After setting up your account, you can add traffic monitoring code to all of your pages in WordPress via plugins and send data instantly to other useful applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account and entering site details with Bing, your details can be used to integrate and automate web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress provides users with a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your traffic generation system in Part Four of this article series.
Social Media Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your various social accounts before you can 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 and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have set up accounts and profile pages with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick those that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we will look at some of these tools in more detail in the Automation phase).
(There are lots of social sites you can syndicate your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online technology platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary sources of traffic. 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 your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute your content to social networks)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your page.
There are many different technologies and third-party applications you can add to your web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up third-party service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
WordPress Settings
Your WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and frequently overlooked traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Section)
As described in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have specifically chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the list of services entered into the Update Services text box
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section includes only one entry …
(WordPress Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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 have an influence traffic. For example, your choice to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content appears 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 site to read 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 in this section as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Generally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to instantly notify various update services whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
Discussion Settings
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 Screen)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s permalinks …
(Configuring post permalinks)
If you need help setting up permalinks, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
WordPress – Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help drive more visitors to your site
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, securing your website or blog is something you cannot afford to ignore.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to hackers and botnets.
More information:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(Yoast SEO – WP Plugins For SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google to index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social features to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social sharing plugins let you select which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, many themes also provide options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your site is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic System – Other Areas To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic system configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business as more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online, it’s important that your website complies with all laws and regulations.
(Is Your Site Compliant?)
For a detailed article about why it’s important to have a compliant website, go here:
Post Categories & Tags
WordPress post tags and categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.
(WordPress post categories help search engines index your web pages, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your website’s tags and categories should be discussed and set up during the Website Planning Process.
When configuring your website or blog to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the tags and categories that have been set up.
Add A Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools discover your online content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. Although Google can index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Page – Don’t Lose Traffic!
When visitors searching online for your website enter the wrong web address into their web browser or click on a hyperlink pointing to a destination on your website that no longer exists, they will typically be presented with a 404 Not Found error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error page can be set up in your server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog fully set up and expertly configured, all you then need to do is add great content consistently to start driving web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different components and external web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many web developers a long time to learn.
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 our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of an tutorial series designed to help you learn how to grow your business online with a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven web marketing methods.
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