Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new visitors automatically to your website 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 website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to begin attracting more traffic is add content consistently!)
In Part 2, we looked at critical setup decisions. 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 website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we will look at the configuration stage of this process. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to drive visitors automatically as you begin to publish 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 business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Businesses are becoming ever more competitive and are looking for every opportunity they can to improve their performance online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous competitive advantage. For WordPress users, an expertly configured website means having a significant advantage from the very beginning.
The Difference Is In The Configuration Stage
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to explain the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence plus an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does it take extra work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with a story.
A Semi-True Story …
Things are going fine in the gizmo-making factory when everything suddenly comes to a halt.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the plant manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Soon afterward, the expert arrives and, without saying a word, heads out directly to the control box. After staring silently at the schematics for about 2 minutes or less, the expert then produces a teeny-weeny hammer and makes a very gentle tap near the bottom-left corner of the unit.
Immediately, the assembly line returns once more to normal.
The floor manager is greatly overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the manager receives an invoice for $5,000.
Confused and outraged, the factory manager rings the expert. Demanding to know why they have been charged such a ludicrous fee for less than five minutes work, he then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic to their sites.
How much money did the widget plant stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one on the factory floor had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to get paid fairly for years spent building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your web site fully configured so all you have to do is publish new content and search engines, social networking sites and dozens of other traffic-generating online properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your website?)
Although the solution to many problems is often ridiculously easy in hindsight, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to work things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than simply installing a website and configuring basic settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which services you need to set up and activate to achieve desired results
- Which settings need to be configured in order to ensure that processes will run as envisioned, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite involved and complicated. This is because it’s not just about installing a piece of software, tweaking some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many components such as your web hosting server, your site, and a number of third-party sites or online services …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart of the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these areas in more detail.
Your Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes. What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings and options in your hosting account specifically for handling all web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic you can 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 bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess and error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step is to set up and configure various third-party sites and online solutions.
External Accounts
The purpose of adding external sites is that all of your content is posted to one central location (your site) and from there, it then gets automatically distributed to other components of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After adding these external services to your setup, content pointing back to your website will be automatically syndicated to search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content will benefit from added exposure online, helping your business tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some third-party sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your settings to speed up the configuration process 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 Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of important data, SEO tools and reports about your website.
Once your Google Webmasters account has been set up, you can use this information to automate web traffic settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO 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 behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrals, etc.
After setting up your up your Google Analytics account and site data has been entered, you can add tracking code to WordPress via any of several Google Analytics plugins and send data automatically to other applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account and site details are set up, you can use this information with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers website owners a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to grow a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your automated traffic generation system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and attract new traffic to your site)
You will need your 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 and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have accounts set up with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can set up 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.
(There are many social sites you can post your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of emerging platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free plans, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add a feed from your WordPress blog …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your account.
There are many different technologies and third-party applications you can incorporate 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.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with third-party services, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
WordPress Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
Your WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search results, 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 Screen)
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 purposely configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services field
By default, this section displays only one entry …
(WordPress Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section …
(You can 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 your content gets seen by visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up 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 website to read 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 your traffic system is concerned, however, the most important setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Typically, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to notify all the update services you have listed whenever a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings)
Discussion Settings
Although discussion settings 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 articles, 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
For a detailed tutorial on setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: How To Change Your WordPress Permalinks
WordPress Traffic Plugins – Configuration
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help drive more visitors to your site
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, website security is something you cannot afford to ignore.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to botnet and hacker attacks.
More info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(SEO plugins help increase traffic by improving your website’s ability to rank better in search engines)
A plugin like Yoast SEO can significantly improve your SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines to index, it also lets you specify how to present your content to Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins.
Most social sharing plugins let you specify which social 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 likes), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which visitors can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Configuring Settings – WordPress Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, some themes also give you built-in options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) can be configured for improved traffic results)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your content is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure For Increased Traffic Results
Last (but by no means least) in the configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you engage in any form of business online (or plan to), it’s important that your site stays compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Site Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
We have created a detailed article about why it’s important to have a legally compliant website here:
WordPress Post Tags And Post Categories
Post tags & post categories help search engines index your pages, which helps you get more traffic.
(Post categories help to improve your site’s search optimization, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your website’s post tags and post categories during the Website Planning Stage.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the tags and categories that have been set up.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A visitor site map that displays all of your site’s pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications discover more of your online content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. Although search engines like Google can index your pages 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.
404 Error Page – A Source Of Lost Traffic Opportunities!
When visitors searching online for your site type in the wrong web address or click on an invalid link, they will normally be presented with an error – page not found message (known as a 404 Not Found page) …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up in your web server, there are several WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then to automatically begin attracting traffic is publish fresh content on a consistent basis.
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 …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many web developers a long time to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is explained in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Three
To keep reading this article, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive article series designed to help you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively and drive traffic sustainably with a WordPress-driven website and proven online marketing methods.
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