Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using WordPress.
In Part 1 of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically begin attracting new traffic is post content regularly!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase of this 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 site, and what to do if your site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this article, we will look at the configuration stage of this process. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site so you can automatically bring new visitors simply by adding new content on your site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by business owners as their greatest challenge online. Businesses are becoming ever more competitive on a global scale and are exploring any and every opportunity they can to increase their competitiveness online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand is a huge advantage over other competitors. For WordPress users, an expertly configured website allows their business to get off to a flying start from the moment their website is launched.
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 developer but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to explain the main difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does a whole lot more work 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 story.
A Semi-True Story …
All was going well in the widget factory when all of a sudden, things stopped.
As no one could figure out what went wrong, the plant manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert immediately walked to the control box. After staring silently at the schematics for 2 minutes or less, the expert then took out a tiny hammer and made a very gentle tap near the top-right side of the control unit.
Immediately, the machines came back to life.
The floor manager was filled with joy as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager received an invoice for the sum of $5,000.
The manager dialed the expert, demanding to know why they were expected to pay such a ludicrous fee for less than five minutes work. He then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrived in the manager’s intray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is driving visitors to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when the machines ground to a halt and no one in the factory floor had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to demand fair compensation for investing years building up the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your web site fully set up so all you have to do is publish new content and search engines, social followers from Facebook and LinkedIn and dozens of other web 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?)
Although the solution to many problems is often quite easy in hindsight, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to figure things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring settings for clients. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts you need to set up and activate to get desired outcomes
- Which settings need to be configured in order to ensure that processes will run as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not so technically difficult, but it’s quite involved. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing a plugin, clicking on a button or two, or tweaking some settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a complex process that involves your server, your website or blog, and a number of third-party sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram showing the configuration process)
Let’s take a brief look at these areas.
Server Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for site installation purposes. We’re talking about configuring settings and options in your web hosting account that affect how your website will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web hosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic you will attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for both good and bad traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like server-level spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these, the next step is to set up and configure a number of external sites and services.
Integration With External Sites
The purpose of setting up external sites is that all of your content is posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it gets distributed automatically to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external services have been added to your setup, content pointing back to your website will get automatically fed to these platforms. Your content and website will receive added exposure online, helping you tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some external sites and online solutions will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site’s settings to 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:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmasters)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with important information, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your Google Webmaster Tools account, you can use this information with web traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrals, etc.
After setting up your Once you have set up Google Analytics, your account data can be easily integrated with WordPress via a simple Google Analytics plugin and instantly sent to other useful applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account is set up, you can use this information to automate traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers website owners a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to build a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which can be accessed by a number of 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 generation system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and bring new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your social media and social bookmarking 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 traffic to your site.
You should have profiles set up with all the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick those that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools (we will review some of these tools in more detail during the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to loads of social bookmarking sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online web platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary-level 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 lets you add an RSS feed from your WordPress site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your RebelMouse page.
There are many different solutions that can be added to your traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore this area further and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress Configuration
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 key areas.
Global Settings – WordPress
The WordPress admin area contains a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(Global 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 purposely configured your settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services section
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is listed …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
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 visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can have an influence traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website 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 in this section as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Typically, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to automatically ping all the update services you have listed whenever new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, leave this box unchecked …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings)
Discussion
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 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings enable your site to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings Section)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your permalinks …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
If you need help setting up permalinks in WordPress, refer to this step-by-step tutorial: Configuring WordPress Permalinks
WordPress – Plugin Settings
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that can add just about every type of functionality to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that improve traffic generation
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No blog is safe from being attacked.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to botnets and hackers.
Go here to learn more:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(Yoast SEO – WP SEO Plugin)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed to Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with members of their own social communities can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website with WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social sharing plugins allow you to specify 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 shares), etc. Some plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Configuring Settings – WordPress 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 site, some themes also include built-in options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes allow you to configure settings for better traffic results)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing features to your pages is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic – Other Important Areas To Consider
Last but not least in the traffic configuration process, are the areas that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and unwanted traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you do any kind of business online (or are planning to), it’s important that your website is compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Legally Compliant?)
To learn more about why it’s important to have a compliant website, go here:
Tags And Post Categories
Post categories and tags help search engines index your pages, which helps you get more traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your website.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s categories and tags earlier on, during the Website Planning Phases.
When considering ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s categories and tags have been set up correctly to deliver optimal benefits and results.
Visitor Site Map
A visitor site map that lists all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools find your online content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. HTML site maps are web pages that link to all other content on your site and provide visitors with a logical map of how your content is structured, while XML sitemaps are mostly just a bunch of code that only search engine bots can read. Although Google will index your site just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – Don’t Lose Traffic!
When visitors enter the wrong URL or click on an invalid link, they are presented with an error page (known as a 404 page) …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
A 404 page can be configured to funnel visitors to your functional pages …
(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 server, there are several plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your website has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do to automatically begin driving web traffic is publish fresh content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different components and web properties …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The skills and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some web 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 covered in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This article is part of an article series designed to help you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively and drive traffic organically with a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven web marketing strategies.
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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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