Welcome to Part Three of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
In Part 1 of this article series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is add web content on a regular basis to automatically start driving traffic!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase of the traffic automation process. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic blueprint. You will learn what makes an expertly configured site different, and just what kind of work is required to ensure that when everything is set up and fully configured, you can get web traffic automatically as you start to publish web content to your web site.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. Also, the business landscape is becoming so much more competitive worldwide and businesses are researching every opportunity they can to get better results online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous advantage over other competitors. With an expertly configured website, your business has a flying start as soon as your website is launched.
The Configuration Stage Is What Makes All 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 understand the difference:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only are more steps needed to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
A Semi-True Story …
All was humming along in the widget assembly workshop when everything suddenly came to a halt.
As no one could figure out what happened, the plant manager decided to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert headed immediately towards the main control box. After staring silently at the electronic components for what seemed like 2 minutes, the expert then produced a teensy-weensy hammer and made a very gentle tap near the left corner of the unit.
Immediately, everything came back to life.
The floor manager was grateful and relieved 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 bill for $5,000.
The factory manager called the expert, demanding to know why the expert had charged them such a large amount of money for less than five minutes work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrived and was placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is driving visitors to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one on the factory floor had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to get paid fairly for years spent acquiring the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a website configured so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other traffic-generating web properties would be instantly notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your website?)
Although experts often make difficult things look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which plugins you need to install to add various functionalities to your site.
- Which services need to be set up and activated to get certain outcomes
- Which options need to be configured in order to make sure processes will run as you have imagined, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this part of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically difficult, it can be quite involved. It’s not as simple as installing and configuring a plugin, clicking a button … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration stage is a process that involves your web server, your site, and various third-party sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we create a simplified flowchart of the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic diagram of the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a brief look at these areas.
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 webhosting account that affect how your website will handle all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic you may attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for good and unwanted traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like configuring server-level spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been checked and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and services.
External Sites
The basic concept of adding external sites is that all content will get published to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will be automatically distributed to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external sites have been added to your traffic system, content with links pointing back to your website is automatically published on these platforms, indexed by search engines and distributed to social media accounts, even to visitors attracted to the platform itself. Your content will then be given added exposure to a new audience and source of traffic.
Some sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site’s 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 WordPress settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmasters lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of essential information, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your Google Webmasters account and site details have been set up, the account information can be used to automate traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s traffic performance, SEO, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, you can add traffic tracking information to all of your pages in WordPress via a Google Analytics plugin and feed data automatically to various other applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account and entering site details, use the account information with web traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers website owners the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your automated traffic system in Part Four of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new traffic to your site)
You will need to set up your various social 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 and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts and profile pages with all of the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can You can syndicate your content to loads of social sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just select the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we will look at some of these tools in more detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to loads of social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online web platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your RebelMouse page.
There are many different technologies and third-party applications you can incorporate into your web traffic system. Please contact us if you would like to explore some of these further and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up third-party site accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
The WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains a powerful and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As stated in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have intentionally chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services section
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section includes only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you 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 Settings
This section affects how visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can influence traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could play a part in someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your site to view 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 traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Typically, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables your site to automatically notify the update services list when a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Screen)
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 content, 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)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow you to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s permalinks …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
To learn more about setting up WP permalinks, see this tutorial: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs
Plugin Settings
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality to your site, including traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what 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 website security.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to botnets and hackers.
Go here to learn more:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(WP Plugin – Yoast SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index, it also lets you configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with their networks can help boost traffic to your site, especially if your site provides content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins available for WordPress.
Many social 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 plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which visitors can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WP Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring layout and design aspects of your site, some themes also provide built-in options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for faster indexing, add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With many themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your site is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features)
Additional Areas Of WordPress To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic configuration process, are the components that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online, you need to ensure that your site stays compliant with all regulations.
(Is Your Site Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article about adding compliance pages to WordPress here:
Tags & Categories
Post tags and post categories help search engines index your web pages, which helps to increase traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s post tags and categories earlier on, during the Website Planning Process.
When considering ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post categories and tags you have set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that displays all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites discover your online 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 not the same thing. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, whereas an XML sitemap is code that only search engines can read. Although Google can index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – An Additional Source Of Web Traffic!
When online visitors enter the wrong URL or click on a link pointing to an incorrect destination on your site, they are greeted with a 404 Not Found error page …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up on your web server, there are several plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then is add new content on a regular basis to begin bringing traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and external web properties …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise required to perform the configuration phase of the traffic automation process typically takes many website professionals months to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is explained in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive article series designed to help you learn how to grow your business online using a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven online marketing methods.
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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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