Welcome to Part Three of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to attract traffic is publish great content consistently!)
In Part 2, we discussed critical setup decisions. 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 site was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In this section of the series, we look at the configuration stage of the traffic system. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to automatically get new traffic as you start posting fresh content on your website.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business becoming so much more competitive worldwide, it’s worth looking into every opportunity you can to improve your performance online.
Having the ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a huge advantage. With an expertly configured WordPress site, you have a flying start and a significant competitive advantage online.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
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 its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to explain the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let me illustrate this point with an amusing anecdote.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
Things were going according to schedule in the gizmo manufacturing plant when everything ground to a sudden halt.
No one could figure out what has happened and so the plant manager decided to call in an expert.
Promptly after arriving, the expert headed out directly to the main control box. After staring at the board for 2 minutes, the expert then took out a tiny little hammer and made a very gentle tap near the right-hand edge of the control unit.
Immediately, everything sprang to life.
The plant manager was overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the manager received a request for payment of services rendered totalling $5,000.
The factory manager dialed the expert, demanding to know why they were expected to pay so much for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of work and promptly 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 main challenge most businesses face online is driving visitors to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when the equipment stopped functioning and no one on the factory floor had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to demand fair compensation for years spent acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to immediately avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WordPress website configured so all you have to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other web properties would be immediately 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 challenges may seem ridiculously simple once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few internal settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which services need to be set up and activated to get desired outcomes
- Which options you need to configure to make sure everything functions as envisioned, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically difficult, it can be quite involved. The reason why is because it’s not just about installing a piece of software, clicking a couple of buttons, or tweaking some settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of different parts including your server, your website, and a number of third-party sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram of the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a better look at these steps.
Your Web Server – Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for site installation purposes. We’re talking about configuring settings and options in your webhosting account specifically for handling 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 beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your website may attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like integrating server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess and error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of external sites and online services.
External Sites
The idea behind setting up external sites is that all content is posted to one central location (your site) and from there, it radiates outwards automatically to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you incorporate these external platforms into your traffic system, content pointing back to your website is automatically published on these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social media accounts, even to users of the platform itself. Your content and site will be given exposure to a new audience and new sources of traffic.
Some of the third-party sites and solutions will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress settings to help speed up the configuration 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 site:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmasters)
Google Search Console lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with essential data, tools and reports about your website.
After setting up your account and entering site details with Google, your details can be used to integrate and 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 performance, SEO, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account and site details, account data can be integrated with WordPress using a Google Analytics plugin used with other applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account and entering site details with Bing Webmaster Tools, your account information can be used to automate web traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress provides users with a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to build a professional business presence online.
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 web traffic generation system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and bring new traffic to your site)
You will need to set up your various social media and social bookmarking accounts before you can 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 attract new traffic to your site.
You should have pages set up with all the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can You can syndicate your content to lots of social sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(You can syndicate your content to loads of social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging technology platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add an RSS feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
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 page.
There are various sites and platforms that can be incorporated into your own traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore some of these and discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
Configuring Your WordPress Site For Traffic
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 of the important points.
Global WordPress Settings
Your WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and often overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As stated in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have purposely chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the list of services entered into the Update Services box
By default, this section displays only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section and WordPress takes care of the rest …
(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 Settings
This section affects how visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your site to view 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 checkbox is ticked or not.
Typically, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to instantly notify all the update services you have listed in the Update Services field whenever a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unchecked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
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 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)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow your site to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your post permalinks …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
We have written a detailed tutorial about using WordPress 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 many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Let’s 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 both good traffic and bad traffic. No site is completely safe from being attacked by hackers.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to bots and hackers.
More information:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages more search engine friendly …
(WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive traffic by improving your website’s ability to rank better in search engines)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines to find and index, it also lets you specify 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 online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if your site provides content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
You can easily add social features to your site using WordPress plugins.
Many social plugins allow you to select which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site 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 grow your traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, many themes also include built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your content is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)
Configuring Other WordPress Features For More Traffic
Last but not least in the configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with good and unwelcome traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business as more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you do business online, you need to ensure that your site remains compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business online.
(Is Your Website Compliant?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, see this article:
Post Tags & Categories
Post tags and post categories help search engines better classify and index your web pages, which improves traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your web pages.)
As we recommend in this article, your website’s categories and tags should be set up during the Website Planning Stages.
When considering ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and post categories that have been set up.
A Site Map Of Your Pages and Posts
A site map that displays all of your site’s pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites find your website 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 not the same things. Only search engines can interpret an XML sitemap. Although Google can index your site 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 can result in increased traffic.
Your Site’s 404 Page Not Found
When visitors searching for your website enter the wrong web address into their web browser or click on links pointing to destinations on your website that no longer exist, they will typically be presented with an error – page not found message …
(A 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your web server, there are several WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your website has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do to automatically attract more traffic is add web content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of different elements and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many website developers a long time to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is covered in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This tutorial is part of an tutorial series aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online with a WordPress website and proven web marketing methods.
Would You Like To Get Automatically Notified When New WordPress Tutorials Are Published? Then Subscribe Using The Form Below!
***
"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
***