Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive traffic automatically to your website using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to drive traffic is publish content regularly!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase of this process. We explained the best way to get started 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 has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic blueprint. You will learn how a WordPress site should be configured to bring visitors automatically just by posting fresh content on your website.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. With business getting so much more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth learning about every advantage that can help you increase your own competitiveness online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous advantage over the competition. For businesses, having an expertly configured website means having an immediate advantage from the word “go”.
The Configuration Process Is What Makes The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to understand the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does a whole lot more labor go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
Everything is humming along in the gizmo assembly line when things grind to a sudden stop.
As no one can figure out what went wrong, the plant manager decides to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert immediately walks towards the control box. After staring silently at the electronic components for about 5 minutes, the expert then takes out a little hammer and makes a very gentle tap about one and half cm from the left-hand corner of the control unit.
Immediately, everything springs back to life.
The floor manager is greatly relieved as he thanks the expert, who then 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.
Furious, the factory manager picks up the phone and rings the expert. Demanding to know why they were expected to pay such a large amount of money for less than 5 minutes work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive web traffic consistently to their sites.
How much money did the plant stand to lose when the machines stopped functioning and no one on the factory floor had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for investing years building up the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to quickly assess and avert a very serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a blog set up and configured so all you have to do is publish content to it and search engines, social sites and dozens of other online properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
Although the solution to many challenges often seems quite easy once it’s been implemented, 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 settings. It 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 third-party accounts need to be set up to get specific results
- Which settings you need to configure to ensure that everything works as envisioned, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite involved and complicated. It’s not as easy as installing a piece of software, configuring some options and settings in your dashboard area … it’s all this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of different parts such as your server, your website or blog, and various third-party sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we were to create a simplified diagram showing the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these areas.
Your Server – Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for website installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings in your hosting account that affect how your site will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your web-hosting account settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your business can attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for both good and unwelcome traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, setting up 404 error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these, the next step is to configure various third-party sites or online services.
Configuring External Web Properties
The purpose of setting up external sites is that all of your content gets posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it gets distributed automatically to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After adding these external services to your configuration, content with links pointing back to your website will be automatically published on your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your site will receive added exposure online, helping your business tap into a whole new audience and traffic source.
Some of these sites will need to have accounts 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 WordPress site’s settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of useful data, SEO tools and reports about your website.
Once your account and site details have been set up, use this information with traffic settings and notifications 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 site’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your account and site data, you can add traffic tracking information to WordPress via plugins and feed data instantly to many other applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. After setting up your account, you can use this information with traffic settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, 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 business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your traffic generation system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and get new visitors to your site)
You will need your various social media accounts set up in order to 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 and social bookmarking accounts and bring new traffic to your site.
Set up profiles with all the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose the ones that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(You can post your content to many social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add an RSS feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an 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 sites and platforms that can be added to your traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that your 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 set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains a powerful and often overlooked traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As described in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of update services entered into the Update Services text area
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is listed …
(WordPress Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section …
(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 visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can have an influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs summaries 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 site further, and whether or not they will visit your website 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 main setting here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Generally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to notify your list of update services when a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(WordPress Settings – 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 sites 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)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings enable your site to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
Here are some of the ways your SEO-friendly URLs can be configured …
(Configuring post permalinks)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about setting up WordPress permalinks, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality 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 WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with 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 cannot afford to ignore the importance of website security.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to attacks from hackers and bots.
For more details, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web pages easy for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index …
(WP SEO Plugin – Yoast SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index, it also gives you control over how your content is presented to Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you post content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social features to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using WordPress plugins.
Most social sharing plugins allow you to select which social sites visitors can share your content 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 sections on your pages which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress Theme Features
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, some themes also give you options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many themes, adding social sharing buttons to your site is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic Automation – Other Aspects To Consider
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site 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 as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you do business online (or are planning to), it’s important that your website remains compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Site Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
To learn more about how to quickly add legal pages to your website or blog, go here:
Tags And Categories
WordPress post categories & tags help search engines better classify and index your pages, which helps to increase traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search engine optimization.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s post categories and tags during the Website Planning Phase.
When looking at ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and post categories you have set up.
Site Map
A visitor site map that lists all of your site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications find your website 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 will index your pages just using 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.
Your Site’s 404 Page
When online users type in the wrong URL or click on links pointing to an incorrect destination on your site, they will typically be presented with a 404 error page …
(A 404 Not Found page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your web server, there are several plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your website expertly configured and fully set up, all you then have to do is post new content consistently to automatically begin attracting more web traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take some website professionals months to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Part 3
To continue reading this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of an article series aimed at helping small business owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively with a WordPress website or blog and proven online 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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