Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
In Part 1 of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is add new content consistently to automatically start attracting web traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we will discuss the configuration phase of this process. We will help you understand why an expertly configured WordPress site is different. You will also learn how much work is required to make sure that when all is set up and fully configured, visitors will automatically start flowing just by publishing web content to your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many business owners as their greatest challenge online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive worldwide and are exploring any advantage available to increase their competitiveness online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can be a huge competitive advantage. For businesses, having an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start from the moment their website is launched.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
There is a 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 its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to describe the key difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence plus an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only are more steps required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
Let me illustrate this point with a story.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
Things were moving along in the widget-making workshop when everything suddenly stopped.
No one could figure out what has happened and so the floor manager decided to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Soon afterward, the expert arrived and headed immediately towards the control box. After staring silently at the wiring diagrams for no more than 2 minutes, the expert then took out a little hammer and made a gentle tap near the left edge of the box.
Immediately, everything came back to life.
The manager was filled with joy as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the manager received a service bill for $5,000.
The manager called the expert, demanding to know why the expert had charged them such an exorbitant fee for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of work. He then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrived in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is driving web traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the widget plant stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one in the business was able to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have every right to get paid fairly for years spent acquiring the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to assess and avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a WP web site set up so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social networks and dozens of other traffic-generating web properties would be instantly notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
Although many experts often make complicated situations and problems look easy, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than installing a website and configuring a few internal settings. It involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install to add various functionalities to your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up to achieve certain outcomes
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured in order to make sure things will function as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this part of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically challenging, it can be quite involved. The reason why is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring one or two plugins, configuring some settings in your admin area or clicking a button … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration phase is a complex process that involves your web server, your website or blog, and various third-party sites and/or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for website installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is tweaking settings and options in your server specifically for handling web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic you may attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for good and unwelcome traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been fine-tuned and configured (if required), the next step is to configure a number of external sites and services.
External Services
The purpose of choosing external sites is that all content will be posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will get distributed automatically to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external platforms have been added to your network, content with links pointing back to your website is automatically syndicated to search, social and aggregator accounts. Your business will then be exposed to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some sites 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, here are just some of the accounts you will need to have set up before configuring your WordPress settings:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with important information, tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site details with Google Webmaster Tools, this information can be used with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s performance, SEO, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your account and site details, you can add traffic monitoring information to all of your web pages in WordPress via a Google Analytics plugin and send data automatically to various other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account and entering site data with Bing, your details can be used with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers users the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to grow a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your web traffic generation system in Part 4 of this 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 to have already set up your social media accounts 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 sites and bring new visitors to your site.
You should set up accounts with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social sites you can You can post your content to many social sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select those that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(You can syndicate your content to many social bookmarking sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online web platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add your WordPress blog feed …
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 RebelMouse website.
There are various solutions you can incorporate into your web traffic system. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global WordPress Settings
The WordPress administration area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have purposely chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services section
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section lists only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress – just add a list of update services to this section and WordPress takes care of the rest …
(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
This section affects how your content gets seen by visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can have an influence web traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears 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 site to view the rest of the content from a partial feed, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The main setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is ticked or not.
Generally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to automatically ping various update services whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings Section)
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 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)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow your site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings Screen)
Here are some of the ways site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, go here: Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs
WordPress – Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality to your site, including 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 WordPress site for handling 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, securing your site is something you cannot ignore.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to botnet and hacker attacks.
More info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages easy for search engines like Google to find and index …
(WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your website’s SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s search engine optimization. Once properly configured, this 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 pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with others can help boost traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social plugins let you choose 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 plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which users can unlock by liking your page.
Configuring WordPress Traffic Generation Theme Features
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, many themes also provide options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing features to your site is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic – Other Features To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can hurt your business when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you engage in any form of business online (or plan to), you need to ensure that your website is compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
For a detailed article on how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website, see this article:
WordPress Post Tags And Post Categories
Post categories & tags help search engines better classify and index your web pages, which helps to increase traffic.
(Categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your web pages.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s categories and tags should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
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 results.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
A site map that lists all of your posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools discover your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. HTML site maps are web pages that link to all other content on your site and provide visitors with a visual map of how your content is structured, while XML sitemaps are mostly filled with code that only search engine bots can interpret. Although search engines like Google can index your site 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 can result in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – Don’t Forget To Configure It!
When visitors searching for your site type in the wrong URL or click on a link pointing to a destination on your site that no longer exists, they are greeted with a 404 Not Found page …
(A 404 Not Found page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your server, there are several WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your website fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do to begin attracting more traffic is add new content consistently.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of different elements and web properties …
(WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration stage of the traffic automation process can take many website developers months to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as you can. This step is addressed in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Section 3
To continue reading about this topic, click here:
This tutorial is part of an tutorial series aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively and drive traffic organically with a WordPress-powered website and proven web marketing methods.
Get Notified When New WordPress Tutorials Are Published – Subscribe To Our Site!
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org
***