Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic 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 website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is add content consistently to begin attracting traffic!)
In Part 2, we focused on critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this section of the series, we look at the configuration phase of this process. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site so you can drive visitors automatically simply by publishing fresh content on your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive on a global scale and are researching every advantage available to get better results online.
Having the ability to automatically generate traffic on demand is a tremendous advantage over other competitors. For businesses, an expertly configured website means having a significant advantage from the word “go”.
The Configuration Stage Is The Difference
There is a significant 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 take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here’s a simple way to describe the key difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only is additional work required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
Knowing Where To Tap
Things were humming along in the widget-making workshop when everything ground to a sudden stop.
As no one could figure out what went wrong, the plant manager decided to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert immediately walked towards the main control box. After staring silently at the control unit for what seemed like 2 minutes or so, the expert then took out a teeny-weeny hammer and made a single tap about one and half inches from the right-hand corner of the box.
Immediately, everything sprang back to life.
The plant manager was greatly overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the manager received a request for payment of $5,000.
The factory manager rang back the expert, demanding to know why they were charged such a large amount of money for less than five minutes work. He then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice arrived in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is driving new visitors to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when production stopped working and no one in the factory floor had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to ask to be compensated fairly for investing years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a blog set up and configured so all you had to do is publish new content and search engines, social followers from sites like Facebook and LinkedIn and dozens of other web 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 the solution to many problems is often quite simple in hindsight, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few basic settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins you need to install for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which third-party services you need to set up and activate to achieve certain results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured in order to make sure processes will work as planned, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this part of the traffic automation system may not seem technically challenging, it can be quite complicated. 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 settings in your admin area … it’s all this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of different parts including your server, your WordPress site, and various third-party sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved in more detail.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your hosting account for installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about tweaking settings in your hosting account specifically for handling web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your web server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic you will attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for good and bad traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like integrating server-level spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites or online services.
External Services
The purpose of adding external sites is that all content will get posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it will get automatically distributed to other parts of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you incorporate these external services into your setup, content with links pointing back to your website will get automatically published on these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social networks, even to users of the platform itself. Your content will receive exposure online, helping your business tap into a new audience and source of traffic.
Some sites and services 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 Search Console
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmasters lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with essential information, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your Google Webmaster Tools account and site details have been set up, this information can be used to automate traffic settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your Once you have set up your Google Analytics account, tracking information can be added to all pages in WordPress using any of several Google Analytics plugins used with other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account with Bing Webmaster Tools have been set up, your details can be used to integrate and automate traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress offers the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your web traffic system in Part Four of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors 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 and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site.
You should have profiles with all the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content syndication tools (we will review some of these tools in more detail further below and during the Automation phase).
(There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your own RebelMouse website.
There are many different solutions that can be added to your own web traffic system. Please contact us if you would like to explore some of these further and discuss a configuration 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 – Configuring Your Site
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global WordPress Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally configured your 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 text area
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is available …
(Writing Settings – Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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
***
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 your content gets seen by visitors 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 content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website 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 in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Generally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to ping various update services when 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 Screen)
Discussion Settings
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 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings enable your site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
Here are some of the ways your SEO-friendly URLs can be configured …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about setting up WP permalinks, go here: Configuring WordPress Permalinks
WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No website or blog is guaranteed immunity from a cyber attack.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to hackers and bots.
For more details, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your web pages …
(SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your site more search engine friendly)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines 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.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with others online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social plugins allow you to choose which 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 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 can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring design and layout aspects of your site, some themes also give you built-in features that let you improve SEO and site linking structure for faster indexing, easily add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your website is as easy as clicking a few buttons to enable the function …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic System – Other Important Features To Configure
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic blueprint configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with 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 do any type of business online (or are planning to), you need to ensure that your website remains compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?)
For a detailed article about how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your site, go here:
Post Tags And Post Categories
Post tags and categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your website.
(WordPress categories help search engines index your pages, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s post tags and categories should be discussed and set up during the Website Planning Phases.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post categories and tags have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits and results.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites discover more of your website content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. HTML site maps provide visitors with a logical map of how your content is structured, while XML sitemaps are mostly code that only search engines can read. Although Google can index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – Don’t Lose Traffic!
When visitors searching online for your website enter the wrong URL or click on an invalid link, they will typically be greeted with a 404 error page …
(A 404 Page)
A 404 Not Found page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your web server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your website or blog has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you then need to do to generate web traffic is publish web content consistently.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of various components and web properties …
(WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise required to perform this stage of the traffic automation process typically takes some web developers months to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is explained in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read more, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help website owners learn how to grow their business online and drive traffic organically with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven marketing methods that are easy and quick to implement.
Want To Get Notified When New WordPress Tutorials Get Published? Then 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
***