Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically start attracting traffic is post great content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase of the automation process. 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 website, and what to do if your website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we look at the configuration phase of this process. We will explain what makes an expertly configured WordPress site different from a professionally configured one, and just what kind of work needs to be done to ensure that when all is set up and fully configured, you can automatically start getting new visitors when you begin to add new content on your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. Businesses are becoming ever more competitive on a global scale and are looking for every opportunity they can to get better results online.
Having the ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous advantage over the competition. With an expertly configured WordPress site, you have an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally 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 describe the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only are more steps needed to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this here is an amusing anecdote.
A Semi-True Story …
Things are humming along in the widget plant when everything grinds to a sudden halt.
As no one can figure out what is wrong, the plant manager decides to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert walks immediately to the control box. After staring at the electronic components for 5 minutes or so, the expert then takes out a teensy-weensy little hammer and makes a single tap about 1 cm from the right-hand corner of the control unit.
Immediately, everything begins to work again.
The plant manager is grateful and relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the manager receives an invoice for the sum of $5,000.
Bordering on outrage, the factory manager calls the expert. Why have they had been charged such a ridiculously high fee for so little time delivering such a minimal amount of work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives and is placed in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive web traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when the equipment stopped working and no one on the business was able to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have every right to ask to be compensated fairly for spending years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to immediately assess and repair a very costly problem?
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 traffic-generating web 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 driving traffic to your website?)
Although experts often make complicated things look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than just installing a website and configuring a few settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins need to be installed to add specific functionalities to your site.
- Which third-party accounts you need to set up and activate to get desired results
- Which options you need to configure to make sure everything will work as planned, etc.
(Generating 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 involved. This is because it’s not as simple as installing a solution, clicking a button, or tweaking some settings in your admin area … it’s all this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a process that involves your web hosting server, your WordPress site, and various third-party sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we create a simple flowchart of all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic diagram of the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these areas.
Your Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your hosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about tweaking settings in your web server that affect how your website will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your web-hosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your website may attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like configuring server-level spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After your server settings have been checked and configured (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites.
Configuring External Web Properties
The basic concept of setting up external sites is that all content is posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it gets syndicated automatically to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After incorporating these external platforms into your network, content with links pointing back to your site gets automatically fed to these platforms. Your content will then be given additional exposure to a new audience and source of traffic.
Some web properties and online services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress settings 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:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Webmasters lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of important information, SEO tools and reports about your website.
After setting up your account and entering site data, your information can be used with traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site details are set up, you can add your account code to all of your web pages in WordPress via a Google Analytics plugin and send data automatically to various other applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account with Bing, you can use your information with web traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress provides users with the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to build a professional business presence online.
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 traffic generation system in Part Four of this series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need your social media accounts set up 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 pages and bring new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have pages set up with all of the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick the ones that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(There are lots of social sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary-level sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different users.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add an RSS feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your own RebelMouse social feed.
There are various solutions that can be incorporated into your traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore some of these further and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with third-party services, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
Configuring WordPress For Traffic
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 of the important points.
Global Settings
The WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Fields 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 one of the most important and often overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Section)
As described in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have specifically configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the list of services entered into the Update Services field
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section displays only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can 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
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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 Settings
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 traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could play a part in someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to view 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 your traffic system is concerned, however, the most important setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to instantly notify your update services list when new posts are 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 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 Section)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s post permalinks …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
We have created a detailed tutorial on using permalinks here: Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks
Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality imaginable to your site, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, web security is something you simply cannot ignore.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to attacks from hackers and bots.
For more details, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages easy for search engines like Google to index …
(SEO plugins help increase traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google to find and index, it also lets you specify how to display your content to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social features to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
There are loads of free or inexpensive social sharing plugins available for WordPress.
Most social plugins allow you to specify which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
Themes
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, some themes also give you built-in features that let you improve SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your site is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic – Additional Configuration Steps
Last but not least in the web traffic system configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Compliance 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 as more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you do business online (or plan to), you need to make sure that your site remains compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?)
If you need help understanding how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website or blog, go here:
Post Categories & Tags
Categories & tags help search engines better classify and index your web pages, which helps to increase traffic.
(Post categories help search engines better classify and index your pages, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s categories and tags should be discussed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phases.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and post categories have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits.
Add A Site Map
A site map that displays all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites discover your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, while an XML sitemap is mostly just a bunch of code that only search engines can understand. Although search engines like Google can index your site just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin 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 – Don’t Forget To Configure It!
When visitors type in the wrong web address or click on a dead hyperlink, they will typically be greeted with an error – page not found message …
(A 404 Not Found page)
A 404 Error Page can 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 in your server, there are plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your website or blog has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you then need to do is publish new content on a regular basis to begin attracting new web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different components and external web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The skills and knowledge involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take some website developers months 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 addressed in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read more, click on the link below:
- Web Site Traffic Blueprint Part 4 – Learn How To Create A Web Traffic-Getting Machine With WordPress
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive article series designed to help you learn how to grow your business and drive traffic organically using a WordPress website and proven online marketing strategies.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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