Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive visitors automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this article series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to generate web traffic is publish new content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we discuss the configuration stage of the WordPress traffic automation system. We will explain why an expertly configured site is different from a professionally configured one, and just what type of work is required to ensure that when everything is fully configured, you can drive new traffic automatically as you begin to post new content to your website.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration Phase
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With business getting ever more competitive worldwide, it’s worth learning about every advantage available to improve your own results online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous advantage over the competition. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website means having an immediate advantage from the very start.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to understand the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only is extra labor required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this point here’s a story.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
Things are moving along in the widget assembly line when suddenly, production comes to a complete stop.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the floor manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert heads out directly to the main control box. After staring silently at the box for no more than 2 minutes, the expert then produces a tiny little hammer from his tool belt and makes a gentle tap about 1 inch from the right-hand edge of the box.
Immediately, everything starts working as before.
The floor manager is grateful and relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a bill for $5,000.
Feeling furious, the factory manager picks up the phone and dials the expert. Why have they had been charged so much for less than 5 minutes work? He then requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice arrives and is placed in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive visitors to their sites.
How much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the business had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have every right to get paid fairly for having invested years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to fix a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your web site fully set up so all you had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other online 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 attracting new visitors to your website?)
While experts often make complex situations and problems look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few basic settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs need to be installed for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts need to be set up and activated to achieve specific results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured to ensure that things will work as expected, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite involved and complicated. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing a piece of software, clicking a button, or configuring some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many parts such as your web hosting server, your web site, and various third-party sites and online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic diagram of the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these steps in more detail.
Your Server – Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your hosting account for installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about tweaking settings in your server that affect how you 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 traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic your website can attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like implementing spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
Once your server settings have been checked and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites and services.
Configuring External Services
The purpose of adding external sites is that all content should be posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, get automatically distributed to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external sites have been added to your setup, content linked back to your website will be automatically published on search, social and aggregator sites. Your site will then be exposed to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of these third-party sites will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site 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:
Google Webmasters
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Webmasters lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of useful data, SEO tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site details, this information can be used to automate web traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s traffic results, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrals, etc.
After setting up your account and site data, you can add visitor tracking code to WordPress using a simple plugin and feed data instantly to many other online applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your account has been set up, you can use this information to integrate and automate traffic settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to grow a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your traffic system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need your social accounts set up 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 sites and social bookmarking accounts and get new traffic to your site.
You should have accounts with all the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up and post your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(You can syndicate your content to lots of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, RSS 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 site that allows you to add an RSS feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your social feed.
There are various technologies and third-party applications that can be incorporated into your traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore some of these further and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up external service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website Or Blog For Traffic
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.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
Your WordPress admin 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 Settings
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most powerful and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have purposely configured your settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services text area
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is available …
(WordPress Update Services)
WordPress lets you 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 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 text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to view the rest of the content from summaries, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The main setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to automatically notify all the update services you have listed whenever a new post gets 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 …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings)
Discussion Settings
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 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 Section)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your post permalinks …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
If you need help setting up WP permalinks, see this step-by-step tutorial: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs
Configuring WordPress Traffic Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No website is guaranteed immunity from cyber-attacks.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to hackers and botnets.
To learn more, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive more traffic by improving your site’s ability to rank better in search engines)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your site’s SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find, classify and index, it also lets you specify how to display your content in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with others can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with WordPress plugins)
You can add social sharing to your website easily with WordPress plugins.
Many social share plugins let you choose which sites visitors can share your content 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 protect 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 help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, many themes also include built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many themes, adding social sharing features to your content is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons and enabling the function …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Other Areas To Configure For Improved Traffic Results
Last but not least in the web traffic system configuration process, are the areas that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business as more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of business online (or plan to), you need to make sure that your website stays compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
If you need help understanding how to quickly and easily add legal pages to your site, go here:
Post Tags & Categories
WordPress post tags & categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better organize and index your website.
(WordPress categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search engine optimization.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your website’s post categories and tags earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
When configuring your website or blog to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s tags and categories have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits.
Add A WordPress 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 website content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Only search engine bots can understand an XML sitemap. Although Google can index your site just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Your 404 Page Not Found
When visitors enter the wrong URL into their browser or click on a link pointing to a page on your site that no longer exists, they will typically be presented with an error – page not found message (known as a 404 page) …
(A 404 Not Found page)
A 404 Error Page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up on your server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your website fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do to generate web traffic is add new content on a regular basis.
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 web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many website developers a long time to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as you can. This step is covered in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section 3
To continue reading about this topic, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively with a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
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