Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically begin bringing new web traffic is post fresh content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of this process. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this section, we will look at the configuration phase of this process. We will help you understand why an expertly configured WordPress site is different from a professionally configured site. You will also discover how much work needs to be done to ensure that when everything is set up and configured, you can get traffic automatically as you start to publish fresh content on your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as their greatest challenge online. With business becoming ever more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth exploring every advantage available to get better results online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge competitive advantage. For business owners, having an expertly configured website means having an immediate advantage from the word “go”.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s a simple way to explain the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only are more steps required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
Things are going well in the gizmo workshop when everything grinds to a sudden halt.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the floor manager decides to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert immediately heads towards the control box. After staring silently at the box for 2 minutes, the expert then takes out a little hammer and makes a single tap about two cm from the left-hand edge of the box.
Immediately, everything comes back to life.
The plant manager is greatly relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the manager receives a request for payment of $5,000.
Bewildered and angry, the manager dials the expert. Why did he charge them such a ridiculously high fee for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of work? He then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives and is placed in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new visitors to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the factory stand to lose when the machines stopped working and no one on the factory floor had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to be compensated fairly for investing years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to immediately assess and repair a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your website or blog set up and configured so all you have to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other online properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
Although many experts often make complex solutions look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few basic settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which programs need to be installed to get various functionalities on your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts need to be set up and activated to achieve desired results
- Which settings you need to configure to make sure things will function to plan, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite involved and complicated. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing a piece of software, configuring some options and settings in your admin area or clicking a button … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a process that involves your web hosting server, your website or blog, and a number of external sites or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If the activities involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart of the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these areas in more detail.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for website installation purposes. What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings in your web server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your web-hosting account settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic your site can attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for good and bad traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like integrating spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these (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 of your content should be posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, be automatically distributed to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you add these external platforms to your configuration, content linked back to your site will be automatically posted to these platforms. Your content and business will then receive exposure online, helping your business tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of these sites will need to be set up before configuring your site’s 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:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with important information, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your account, you can use this information to integrate and automate web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site details are set up, traffic tracking information can be integrated with WordPress using a simple plugin and automatically sent to many other useful applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account and entering site data with Bing, you can use this information with web traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress offers website owners a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to grow a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, 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 traffic generation system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(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 configure these as part of 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 bring new visitors to your site.
You should set up accounts with all the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can You can syndicate your content to lots of social bookmarking sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick the ones that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools (we will look at some of these tools in more detail during the Automation phase).
(There are many social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of emerging web platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary-level sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different user types.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute your content to social networks)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your own RebelMouse social feed.
There are many different solutions that can be added to your web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore some of these and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up accounts with third-party sites, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website Or Blog For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress 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.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
By default, all WordPress installations include a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Screen)
As stated below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of services entered into the Update Services box
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section lists only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of all the update services you want to notify as soon as you publish a new post 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
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 to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to get the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The main setting in this section as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to automatically notify various update services whenever a new post is 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 Section)
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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks Screen)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, go here: Changing WordPress Permalinks
WordPress – Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress 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, securing your website is something you simply cannot ignore.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and bots.
For more details, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving improving the way search engines find and index your website …
(WordPress Plugin – Yoast SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines to find, classify 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 share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you publish content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins to choose from.
Most social share plugins allow you to choose which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
Theme Settings
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 layout and design of your site, some themes also provide built-in options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a free theme) include built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing features to your content is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic System – Additional Configuration Areas
Last but not least in the traffic configuration process, are the components that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for 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 any type of business online, you need to ensure that your website is found to comply with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Legally Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article on adding legal pages to WordPress here:
WordPress Post Tags And Categories
WordPress post tags and categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.
(Categories help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which improves traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s post tags and categories should be discussed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stages.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories you have set up.
HTML Site Map
A site map that displays all of your pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools discover your online content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for 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, whereas an XML sitemap is mostly filled with code that only search engine bots can read. Although Google can index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
Don’t Forget Your Site’s 404 Page Not Found
When visitors type in the wrong web address or click on an invalid hyperlink, they will typically be greeted with a 404 Not Found error page …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up on your web server, there are several plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then to start generating traffic is post new content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of different elements and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many website professionals months to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is addressed in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive tutorial series aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online using a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven online marketing methods.
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