Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to attract more traffic is add web content consistently!)
In Part Two, we discussed critical setup decisions. 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 site, and what to do if your website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In this article, we will look at the configuration phase of this process. We explain what makes an expertly configured WordPress site different from a professionally configured one, and what kind of work needs to be done to make sure that when all is fully configured, web traffic will automatically start flowing as you begin publishing content to your site.
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as their greatest challenge online. Businesses are becoming increasingly more competitive and are exploring every advantage they believe will improve their results and performance online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge advantage over other competitors. With an expertly configured website, you have a significant advantage from the word “go”.
The Configuration Process Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here’s one way to explain the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence plus an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only is extra labor required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special type of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this point here is a little story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All is moving along in the widget factory when things suddenly grinds to a stop.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the manager decides to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert walks immediately to the main control box. After staring at the electronic components for no more than 5 minutes or so, the expert then produces a teensy-weensy hammer and makes a very gentle tap about 3 inches from the left corner of the box.
Immediately, everything begins working again.
The manager is greatly relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the manager receives a request of payment for services totalling $5,000.
Confused and outraged, the factory manager calls the expert. Why had he charged them such a ludicrous fee for so little time spent delivering such minimal amount of work? He then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice statement 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 visitors to their sites.
How much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one on the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have every right to get paid fairly for years spent developing the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to assess and avert a very serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress web site configured so all you had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other online properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
While the solution to many problems is often ridiculously simple once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than just installing a website and configuring settings for a client. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install to get specific functionalities on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up to get certain results
- Which settings need to be configured to ensure that things will work to plan, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the WordPress traffic automation system is not so technically difficult, but it’s quite involved and complicated. This is because it’s not just about installing and configuring one or two plugins, tweaking some options and settings in your dashboard area or clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration stage is a complex process that involves your server, your web site, and a number of external sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we try to flowchart all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the configuration phase)
Let’s examine what’s involved in more detail.
Server Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your hosting account for site installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings and options in your web server that affect how your site will handle all 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 welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your website may attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for both good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like integrating server-level spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these, the next step is to configure various external sites and services.
Configuring External Services
The basic idea of setting up external sites is that all content will be published to a central location (your site) and from there, it will syndicate automatically to other parts of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After adding these external sites to your setup, content pointing back to your site gets automatically fed to search, social and aggregator sites. Your business will then be exposed to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site to save time 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 WordPress site’s settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Webmasters lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of important information, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your account with Google Search Console have been set up, the account information can be used to integrate and automate traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic results, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data have been set up, visitor tracking data can be integrated with WordPress via any of several Google Analytics plugins used with other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your account is with Bing are set up, use the account information with web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress provides users with the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, 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 this into your automated web traffic system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media Pages
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and get new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your social accounts 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 and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have accounts and pages set up with all of the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose those that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we will look at some of these tools in more detail during the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to lots of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free plans, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add an RSS feed from your WordPress site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your RebelMouse website.
There are various solutions you can add to your own traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore some of these and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up third-party service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
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 key areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
The WordPress administration 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 …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most powerful and often overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Screen)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically configured your site settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services text area
By default, this section includes only one entry …
(Writing Settings – WordPress Update Services)
You can 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
***
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 web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your site to read 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 traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to automatically notify various update services when a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(Global Settings – 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 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks enable WordPress to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks Screen)
Here are some of the options for configuring your SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
For a detailed tutorial about setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs
Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that can add almost every type of functionality to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to attract more visitors to your site
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, website security is something you simply cannot ignore.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to attacks from hackers and bots.
For more details, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(WordPress Plugins For SEO – Yoast SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages 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 pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with others online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
There are loads of free or inexpensive social sharing plugins available for WordPress.
Many social sharing plugins let you specify which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, many themes also include options for improving SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes like Graphene (a free theme) can be configured for better traffic results)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your content is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic Automation – Other Important Areas To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the configuration process, are the elements that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for both good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you make money online, it’s important that your website is compliant with all government regulations.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, go here:
WordPress Categories & Tags
Post categories & tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your pages.
(Categories help to improve your site’s search optimization, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s post categories and tags should be set up during the Website Planning Phase.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post categories and tags you have set up.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools discover 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. Only search engine bots can interpret an XML sitemap. 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 Forget This!
When visitors searching for your site enter the wrong web address or click on a hyperlink pointing to an incorrect destination on your site, they will typically be presented with an error page …
(A 404 Error Page)
A 404 page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then is publish fresh content on a regular basis to automatically begin attracting new web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and web properties …
(WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take some website developers a long time to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is covered in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Three
To continue reading this article, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials aimed at helping website owners learn how to grow their business online cost-effectively and drive traffic organically using a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven marketing strategies that are easy to implement.
Get Notified When New Tutorials Are Published – Subscribe To WPCompendium.org!
***
"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com
***