Welcome to Part Three of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this article series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is publish web content consistently to drive web traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed critical setup decisions. We helped you understand 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 site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this article, we will discuss the configuration stage of this process. You will learn what makes an expertly configured site different than a professionally configured website. You will also learn how much work needs to be done to ensure that when all is set up and configured, you can bring traffic automatically just by publishing content to your site.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as their greatest challenge online. Businesses are becoming ever more competitive on a global scale and are researching any and every advantage they believe will improve their performance and results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge advantage over other competitors. With an expertly configured WordPress site, you have a significant advantage from the very beginning.
The Configuration Phase Is What Makes All The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to describe the main difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does it take more work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
Let me illustrate this with an anecdote.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
Things were going according to schedule in the widget-making plant when everything ground to a sudden halt.
No one could figure out what has happened and so the floor manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Soon afterward, the expert arrived and, without uttering a word, went immediately to the main control box. After staring at the control unit for 5 minutes or less, the expert then took out a teensy-weensy hammer from his tool box and made a gentle tap about one cm from the left corner of the box.
Immediately, the assembly line sprang back to life.
The plant manager was delighted as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the manager received a request for payment of $5,000.
The factory manager dialed the expert, demanding to know why they were charged such a large amount of money for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of 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 main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive traffic consistently to their sites.
How much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one in the business had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for spending years developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to immediately avert a very serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a web site set up so all you have to do is publish new content and search engines, social networking sites and dozens of other traffic-generating web properties would be immediately 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 the solution to many challenges is often quite easy once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than simply installing a website and configuring settings for a client. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which third-party services need to be set up and activated to get specific outcomes
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure to ensure that things work as planned, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This part of the traffic automation system is not so technically challenging, but it’s quite complicated. This is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring a piece of software, configuring some settings in your dashboard area … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a process that involves your server, your web site, and various third-party sites …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart of the configuration process)
Let’s examine what’s involved.
Your Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for website installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about configuring settings in your web server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your business may attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for good and unwanted traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like implementing server-level spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
After your web server settings have been fine-tuned and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and services.
External Accounts
The basic concept of adding external sites is that all of your content will get posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will be distributed automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external platforms have been added to your system, content linking back to your website will get automatically published on search, social and aggregator sites. Your site will then receive additional exposure online, helping your business tap into new sources of traffic.
Some of the third-party sites will need to be 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 before configuring your WordPress site’s settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly site)
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 important data, SEO tools and reports about your website.
After setting up your account and entering site data, this information can be used with web traffic 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 campaigns, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account has been set up, visitor tracking information can be added to all of your pages in WordPress using a simple plugin and automatically sent to many other useful applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account and site data have been set up, the account details can be used to automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress offers users a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to build a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your web traffic system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and bring new traffic to your site)
You will need your various 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 accounts and drive new visitors to your site.
You should have pages set up with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can You can syndicate your content to many social bookmarking sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we cover some of these tools in more detail during the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to loads of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of emerging technology platforms and content aggregators that can serve as second-tier sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your own RebelMouse website.
There are various sites and platforms you can incorporate into your own traffic blueprint. Please 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 third-party service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
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 of the important areas.
Configuring WordPress Settings
By default, all WordPress installations include a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most powerful and frequently overlooked traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Section)
As described below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the update services entered into the Update Services section
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section contains only one entry …
(Writing Settings – Update Services)
You can 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 takes care of the rest …
(You can 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 in this section can influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to get the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as traffic is concerned, however, the most important setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to automatically notify all the update services you have specified in the Update Services area when new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion
Although this section is 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
Permalinks allow your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
Here are some of the ways permalink URLs can be configured …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
We have written a detailed tutorial about using permalinks here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings For Traffic Generation
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that can add just about every type of functionality imaginable to your site, including 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 web site is completely safe from being attacked by hackers.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
Go here to learn more:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages more indexable …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress Plugins For SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines to index, it also lets you specify how to display your content in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content with others can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with WordPress plugins.
Many social plugins allow you to choose which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to protect content which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings For Traffic Generation
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring layout and design elements of your site, many themes also include built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing features to your site is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Other Areas To Configure
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic blueprint configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and bad 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 is found to comply with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help understanding how to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your website, refer to this article:
Post Tags And Categories
WordPress categories & tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your web pages.
(Post categories help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which improves traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to discuss and set up your website’s categories and tags earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the categories and tags you have set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that displays all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors 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!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although Google can index your site just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Page – Don’t Lose Traffic!
When visitors searching online for your site type in the wrong URL into their browser or click on a hyperlink pointing to a destination on your website that no longer exists, they are greeted with a 404 page …
(A WordPress 404 Error Page)
A 404 Not Found error page can be turned into a useful source of traffic to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up in your web server, there are several WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then to automatically start generating traffic is publish content on a regular basis.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of various components and web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise required to perform this process can take many website developers months to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as you can. This step is explained in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively using a WordPress-driven website and proven marketing strategies that are easy to implement.
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