Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated web traffic generation machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this article series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to automatically attract traffic is publish content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress 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 to automatically start to get new visitors simply by regularly publishing web content on your site.
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive and are looking for any and every advantage they can to improve their performance online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand is a tremendous advantage. An expertly configured website gives you an immediate advantage from the word “go”.
The Configuration Stage Is What Makes The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here’s a simple way to understand the differences:
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 and an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only is more labor required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
Knowing Where To Tap
All is humming along in the gizmo assembly plant when all of a sudden, the machines stops.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the plant manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert immediately walks towards the control box. After staring at the wiring board for less than 3 minutes or so, the expert then takes out a teeny-weeny hammer from his shirt pocket and makes a gentle tap near the bottom-right corner of the box.
Immediately, everything begins working once more.
The floor manager is delighted as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager receives a request for payment of $5,000.
Bewildered, the factory manager calls the expert. Demanding to know why they have been charged so much for less than five minutes work, he then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives and is placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new visitors consistently to their sites.
How much money did the factory stand to lose when production stopped working and no one in the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have the right to ask to be compensated fairly for having spent years developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to fix a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WP website or blog set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and search engines, social followers from Facebook and Twitter 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 attracting new visitors to your website?)
Although many experts often make complex things look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to figure things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed to get desired functionalities on your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up to achieve certain results
- Which settings you need to configure in order to make sure everything will work as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving new 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. The reason why is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring a solution, clicking on a button or two, or configuring some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration phase involves the integration of many parts including your web hosting server, your website or blog, and a number of external sites and online services …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If we try to flowchart the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing the configuration phase)
Let’s examine what’s involved in more detail.
Configuring Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about tweaking settings and options in your web server that affect how you will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the 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 about evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like configuring server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, 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 third-party sites and online services.
External Sites
The idea behind setting up external sites is that all content should be posted to one 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.
After incorporating these external platforms into your setup, content linking back to your website gets automatically syndicated to search, social and aggregator accounts. Your site will receive added exposure online, helping you tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of these web properties and online services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site to speed up the process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, here are just some of the accounts you will need to have set up before configuring your settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Webmasters lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of essential data, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your account with Google Search Console, this information can be used to automate traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account and site details, you can add tracking code to WordPress using a simple Google Analytics plugin and feed data automatically to other useful applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. After setting up your account, this information can be used with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained 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 platform if you plan to grow a professional business presence online.
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 these features into your web traffic system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need your various social media accounts set up in order to 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 bring new visitors to your site.
Set up accounts and profile pages with all of the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select those that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(You can post your content to lots of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online web platforms and content 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 that allows you to add a feed from your WordPress site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute your content to social networks)
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 social feed.
There are various solutions you can incorporate into your own traffic system. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up external service accounts, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
Your WordPress admin area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains an important and often overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As described below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have intentionally chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services field
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section includes only one entry …
(Writing Settings – 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 traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could play a part in someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to get the rest of the content from summaries, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as traffic is concerned, however, the main setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to notify various update services whenever a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
Discussion Settings
Although the settings in this section 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 posts, 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)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the ways search-friendly URLS can be configured …
(Configuring permalinks)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, refer to this step-by-step tutorial: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring Settings – WordPress Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality to your website, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Let’s take a brief look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is completely safe from a cyber attack.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to botnet and hacker attacks.
For more details, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving improving how search engines find, classify and index your web pages …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress Plugins For SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines 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 GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you publish content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins.
Many social plugins let you select which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to protect content which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring design and layout aspects of your website, many themes also give you built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes include built-in traffic optimization features)
With many themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your site is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic – Additional Configuration
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic configuration process, are the components that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in visitor 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 when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you engage in any form of business online (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your site is compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done.
(Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help understanding how to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your site, refer to this article:
WordPress Post Categories And Tags
Tags & post categories help search engines index your pages, which improves traffic.
(WordPress post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better organize and index your web pages.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your website’s post tags and categories earlier on, during the Website Planning Process.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the categories and tags you have set up.
A Site Map Of Your Pages and Posts
A site map that displays all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools discover more of your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although search engines like Google can index your pages 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 can result in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – A Source Of Lost Traffic Opportunities!
When visitors searching online for your website enter the wrong URL into their web browser or click on links pointing to an incorrect destination on your site, they are greeted with a 404 page …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up in your web server, there are several plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your website has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do to bring traffic is publish new content on a regular basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of different elements and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise required to perform this stage of the traffic automation process can take many web professionals months to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is addressed in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read more, click here:
This tutorial is part of an article series aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business with a WordPress-driven website and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
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