Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new visitors automatically to your site using WordPress.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is add content consistently to automatically bring traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase. We explained the best way to start 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 existing site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we will discuss the configuration phase of the traffic system. We explain how to configure a WordPress site so you can automatically begin driving web traffic when you publish fresh content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by business owners as their greatest challenge online. With competition making business survival progressively tougher businesses are looking for any advantage they can that can help you increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge advantage. For businesses, an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start as soon as their site is launched.
The Difference Is In The Configuration Process
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to understand the differences:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a web presence plus an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only are more steps needed to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
Allow me to illustrate this with a little story.
Knowing Where To Tap
All is going just fine in the gizmo manufacturing plant when suddenly, things grinds to a stop.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the plant manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert immediately goes to the control box. After staring silently at the control unit for 5 minutes or so, the expert then takes out a tiny hammer from his utility belt and makes a gentle tap about three cm from the right-hand side of the control unit.
Immediately, everything comes back to life.
The floor manager is grateful and relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the manager receives a bill for $5,000.
Angrily, the manager dials the expert. Why had he charged them such an exorbitant fee for less than five minutes work? He then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving new traffic to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the business had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have every right to get paid fairly for years spent acquiring the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to immediately avert a serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a WP web site fully set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and search engines, social media and dozens of other traffic-generating online properties would be instantly notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your website?)
While experts often make complicated situations and problems look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring some basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which plugins you need to install for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up and activated to achieve desired results
- Which options need to be configured to make sure things will work as expected, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not so technically challenging, but it’s quite complicated. The reason why is because it’s not just about installing and configuring a piece of software, tweaking some settings in your dashboard area … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration phase is a process that involves your server, your site, and various third-party sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we create a simplified diagram showing the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart of the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these areas in more detail.
Your Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for installation purposes. What we are talking about, is configuring settings and options in your hosting account that affect how you will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic your business may attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for both good and bad traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirections, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step is to configure a number of external sites.
External Services
The idea behind adding external sites is that all content gets posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it radiates outwards automatically to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you incorporate these external platforms into your traffic network, content linking back to your site is automatically syndicated to search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content receives increased exposure online, helping your business tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of the sites and online platforms will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site 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 – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmasters lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with useful information, SEO tools and reports about your website.
After setting up your account and entering site details with Google Webmaster Tools, use this information with web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
After setting up your account, you can add visitor tracking code to WordPress via any of several Google Analytics plugins and feed data automatically to various other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account with Bing, you can use this information to automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers users the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you are planning to grow a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your traffic system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and attract new traffic to your site)
You will need to have already set up your various social media accounts before you can 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 drive new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have pages set up with all the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(There are many social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online technology platforms and content aggregators that can act 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 site 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 RebelMouse social feed.
There are many different solutions that can be incorporated into your own traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore some of these further and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up third-party site accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
WordPress Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
Your WordPress administration area contains a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains an important and frequently 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 have purposely configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services box
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is listed …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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
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 web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your site to view 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 check box is enabled or not.
Normally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to ping all the update services you have listed whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
Discussion
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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your post permalinks …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
If you need help setting up WordPress permalinks, go here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks
WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins – Configuration
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality imaginable to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to improve traffic generation
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is immune from cyber attacks.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and bots.
Go here for more details:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web content easier for search engines to index …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress Plugin)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
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 real value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
There are many free or inexpensive social sharing plugins available for WordPress users.
Most social sharing plugins allow you to choose which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring WordPress Traffic Generation Theme Features
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, some themes also give you options for improving SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your pages is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons to configure your options and enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure For Improved Traffic Results
Last but not least in the web traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you do any type of business online (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your website is found to comply with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, see this article:
Categories And Tags
Post categories and tags help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which helps to increase traffic.
(Categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better organize and index your pages.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and post categories should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
When looking at ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and categories have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A visitor site map that lists all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites find more of your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although Google can index your site just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin 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 Error Page
When visitors enter the wrong web address or click on a hyperlink pointing to an incorrect destination on your site, they are greeted with a 404 page …
(A 404 Not Found error page)
A 404 page can redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your web server, there are several WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then is publish content consistently to automatically generate more web traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many web 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 covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section Three
To continue reading about this topic, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of articles designed to help business owners learn how to grow their business and drive traffic sustainably with a WordPress website or blog and proven marketing strategies that are easy to implement.
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