Welcome to Part Three of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to automatically begin bringing web traffic is post content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to get started 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 has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In this section, we will look at the configuration stage of this process. We will show you how to configure a WordPress site so you can begin to get new traffic automatically just by adding content to your website.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive on a global scale and are looking for any opportunity they can to get better results online.
Having the ability to automatically generate traffic on demand is a tremendous advantage. With an expertly configured website, you have a significant advantage from the very beginning.
The Configuration Stage Is What Makes The Difference
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 explain the differences:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does a whole lot more labor go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing story.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
All is running smoothly in the widget-making manufacturing plant when suddenly, things cease working.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the floor manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert heads directly towards the control box. After staring at the schematics for 3 minutes or less, the expert then takes out a teeny-weeny hammer from his tool belt and makes a single tap about one cm from the right side of the unit.
Immediately, everything comes back to life.
The floor manager is greatly overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the manager receives an invoice for the amount of $5,000.
Bewildered and angry, the factory manager picks up the phone and rings the expert. Why had he charged them so much for less than 5 minutes work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice arrives on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving traffic to their sites.
How much money did the plant stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one in the business was able to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to get paid fairly for having invested years building up the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and fix a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your WP web site set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest 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 challenges can seem ridiculously easy once it’s been implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than just installing a website and configuring a few basic settings. It involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which plugins you need to install to get specific functionalities on your site.
- Which 3rd-party services need to be set up to achieve specific outcomes
- Which options need to be configured in order to ensure that everything will function as envisioned, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This part of the traffic automation system is not so technically challenging, but it’s quite involved. The reason why is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring one or two plugins, clicking a couple of buttons, or tweaking some options and settings in your dashboard area … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of different components including your web hosting server, your website, and a number of external sites or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If we were to create a simple diagram showing the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified diagram of all the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a brief look at these areas.
Server Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your web-hosting account that affect how your website will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web hosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic your website will attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for both bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like integrating spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirections, etc?)
After fine-tuning your server settings and configuring these, the next step is to set up and configure a number of third-party sites.
External Sites And Services – Configuration
The basic idea of adding external sites is that all of your content will be posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will syndicate automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external sites have been added to your system, content linking back to your website is automatically syndicated to these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social sites, even to users of the platform itself. Your content will be exposed to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some of these sites and online 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, you will want to set up the following accounts:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Webmasters lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of important information, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your account and entering site data, your account details can be used with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s results, SEO, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrers, etc.
After setting up your up your account and entered your site details, you can add traffic monitoring information to WordPress using plugins and feed data automatically to other online applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account, this information can be used with traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers website owners the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. 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 tools, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your traffic generation system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social 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 accounts and get new visitors to your site.
You should set up accounts and profiles with all of the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are many social sites you can set up accounts with and syndicate your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose the ones that will work well with your system and/or content syndication tools (we will review some of these tools in more detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to many social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online web platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, 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 your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your own RebelMouse account.
There are various platforms that can be added to your own web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
The WordPress administration area contains a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings)
As stated below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services field
By default, only one service is listed …
(Writing Settings – Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list containing all of the update services you want notified to this section …
(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
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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 web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to read the rest of the content from summaries, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The main setting in this section as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Generally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to automatically 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)
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 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 Section)
Permalinks
Permalinks enable your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, refer to this tutorial: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add just about every type of functionality to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that affect traffic generation
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for handling 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, you cannot afford to ignore the importance of website security.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to botnet and hacker attacks.
Go here for more info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find, crawl and index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with their social networks can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you publish content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily using WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with WordPress plugins.
Most social share plugins allow you to choose which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, many themes also provide built-in options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes allow you to configure settings for better traffic results)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing features to your pages is as easy as clicking a few buttons and enabling the function …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features)
Configuring Other WordPress Settings For Traffic
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic configuration process, are the areas that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Compliance Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and unwanted traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business as more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you make money online (or plan to), you need to make sure that your website is compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?)
For a detailed article on how to quickly add legal pages to your website, refer to this article:
Post Tags & Post Categories
WordPress post categories & tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better classify and index your web pages.
(WordPress post categories help search engines classify and index your pages, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your site’s post tags and categories earlier on, during the Website Planning Phases.
When considering 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 Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools find more of your web content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. 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 can result in increased traffic.
Your 404 Page Not Found
When visitors enter the wrong web address into their web browser or click on a link pointing to an incorrect destination on your website, they are greeted with an error page …
(A WordPress 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up in your server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do to automatically drive more web traffic is post great content on a regular basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of different elements and web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The skills and knowledge required to perform this phase of the traffic automation process typically takes some website developers months to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is addressed in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping business owners learn how to grow their business online cost-effectively using a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven marketing strategies that are easy to implement.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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