Welcome to Part Three of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is publish new content on a consistent basis to automatically start generating more traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on 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 website, and what to do if your existing site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will look at the configuration phase of the traffic system. We explain why an expertly configured site is different, and how much work needs to be done to ensure that when all is set up and configured, you will drive new traffic automatically when you begin publishing fresh content to your website.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as their greatest challenge online. Also, the business landscape is becoming so much more competitive on a global scale and businesses are exploring any and every advantage they can that can help you increase their competitiveness online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand can be a huge advantage. With an expertly configured website, your business has an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
The Configuration Stage Is What Makes All The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to understand the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!)
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 expert knowledge.
Let me illustrate this point with an amusing story.
Knowing Where To Tap
Things are humming along in the widget assembly line when production suddenly stops.
No one can figure out what went wrong and so the floor manager decides to call in an expert.
The expert arrives shortly after being summoned and heads immediately towards the control box. After staring at the wires and circuitry for about 2 minutes, the expert then takes out a tiny little hammer from his tool belt and makes a gentle tap about 1 inch from the left side of the box.
Immediately, everything comes back to life.
The floor manager is relieved as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the manager receives an invoice for the sum of $5,000.
Furious, the manager calls the expert. Why had he charged them so much for so little time delivering such minimal amount of 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 new traffic to their sites.
How much money did the widget factory stand to lose when the machines ground to a halt and no one in the factory floor had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have every right to demand fair compensation for spending years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WordPress web site set up so all you had to do is publish new content and search engines, social networking sites 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 website?)
While the solution to many problems is often quite easy once it’s been implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few internal settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which plugins need to be installed for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up to achieve specific results
- Which settings need to be configured in order to make sure things function to plan, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite complicated. It’s not just about installing and configuring a plugin, clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration phase is a process that involves your web hosting server, your WordPress site, and a number of third-party sites and online services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we were to create a simplified diagram of the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic diagram of the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Server Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about configuring settings and options in your server that affect how your website will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your web server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic you can attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like integrating server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirections, etc?)
After your web server settings have been fine-tuned and configured, the next step is to configure various external sites and services.
External Web Properties And Accounts – Configuration
The idea behind setting up external sites is that all of your content should be published from one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will get syndicated automatically to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you incorporate these external services into your traffic network, content linking back to your website is automatically posted to search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and website will receive increased exposure online, helping you tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of the third-party sites and online solutions will need to have accounts set up before configuring your 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 WordPress site’s settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmasters lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with useful data, SEO tools and reports about your website.
Once your account has been set up, you can use this information with traffic-related settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account has been set up, you can add traffic tracking code to all of your web pages in WordPress using a simple Google Analytics plugin and send data instantly to other applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account has been with Bing have been set up, the details can be used with web traffic settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress provides users with a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to grow 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 with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your web traffic system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and get new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social media and social bookmarking accounts set up before you can integrate these with your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have set up accounts and profiles with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select those that will work well with your system and/or content syndication tools (we will look at some of these tools in more detail in the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to many social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary-level sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your page.
There are various platforms you can incorporate into your own web traffic system. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website
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 points.
Global Settings
The WordPress administration area contains a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As described below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have intentionally configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services text area
By default, this section displays 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 and WordPress will do the rest …
(Notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress!)
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 your content gets seen by readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can have an influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your blog 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 here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is ticked or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows your site to instantly notify all the update services you have listed when new posts get 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 unticked …
(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 blogs 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow you to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the ways search-friendly URLS can be configured …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
If you need help setting up permalinks in WordPress, refer to this step-by-step tutorial: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks
Configuring WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help improve traffic generation
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No site is immune from being attacked by hackers.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and bots.
More info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google 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 your visitors to share your content online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if your site provides content that adds real value to readers.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins available for WordPress users.
Most social plugins allow you to 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 followers), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
WordPress Traffic Theme Features – Configuration
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 design and layout of your website, many themes also give you built-in features that let you improve SEO and site linking structure for faster indexing, easily add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your content is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic System – Additional Configuration Areas
Last (but by no means least) in the configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and unwanted traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you do business online (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your website is compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business practices online.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Compliant?)
To learn more about how to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress site, see this article:
Post Tags & Categories
Post tags & post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your website.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your website’s post tags and categories during the Website Planning Stage.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s tags and categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal benefits.
A Site Map Of Your Pages and Posts
A site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications discover more of your web content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Only search engines can interpret an XML sitemap. Although Google can index your pages just using 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 can result in increased traffic.
Your WordPress 404 Page
When online visitors type in the wrong URL into their web browser or click on an invalid link, they are greeted with a 404 error page …
(A 404 Error Page)
A 404 Not Found error page can redirect confused visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up in your server, there are several WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your site expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then is publish great content regularly to automatically attract new traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of different elements and web properties …
(WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take many website professionals 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 section of the WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section 3
To keep reading, click here:
This article is part of an article series designed to help you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively and drive traffic automatically using a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven web marketing strategies.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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