Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a site into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
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 site, all you have to do is add fresh content regularly to automatically generate traffic!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase of the traffic automation process. We helped you understand the best way to start 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 site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic blueprint. We will show you how a WordPress site should be configured in order to bring new visitors automatically when you start adding web content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business becoming increasingly more competitive worldwide, it’s worth learning about every opportunity you can to get better results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge advantage over the competition. An expertly configured website gives your business an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
The Configuration Phase Is What Makes All 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 builder but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here is a simple way to understand the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only is additional work required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expert knowledge.
Allow me to illustrate this point with an amusing story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All is going just fine in the gizmo workshop when everything comes to a sudden stop.
No one can figure out what went wrong and so the manager decides to call in an expert.
Soon afterward, the expert arrives and heads out immediately to the control box. After staring at the schematics for less than 2 minutes, the expert then produces a teeny-weeny hammer and makes a very gentle tap about 2 inches from the right-hand edge of the unit.
Immediately, everything springs back to life.
The floor manager is grateful and relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager receives a request of payment for services for the amount of $5,000.
Puzzled and confused, the factory manager picks up the phone and calls the expert. Why had he charged them such a ludicrous fee for less than 5 minutes work? He then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is driving traffic to their sites.
How much money did the plant stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one in the business was able to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have every right to get paid fairly for having invested years developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly assess and fix a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WP web site set up and configured so all you had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social networks and dozens of other web properties would be instantly 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 difficult things look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to work things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed to get certain functionalities on your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts you need to set up and activate to achieve desired outcomes
- Which options need to be configured in order to make sure things will work as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite complicated. It’s not just about installing and configuring one or two plugins, tweaking some settings in your admin area or clicking on a button or two … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many parts including your web server, your web site, and a number of external sites and services …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we were to create a simple flowchart showing the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic diagram of the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved.
Your Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your hosting account for installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is tweaking settings in your server that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your 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 traffic your business can attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for both good and unwelcome traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like configuring spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and services.
External Sites
The idea behind adding external sites is that all of your content should be published from a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, syndicate automatically to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external services have been added to your network, content with links pointing back to your website gets automatically fed to these platforms, indexed by search engines and distributed to social sites, even to users of the platform itself. Your content and website will be exposed to a new audience and source of traffic.
Some of the external sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site 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 before configuring your settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Webmasters lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with essential data, tools and reports about your website.
After setting up your account, use this information with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your up your account and entered your site details, you can add visitor tracking code to all of your pages in WordPress using any of several Google Analytics plugins and send data automatically to various other online applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your account has been set up, use this information to integrate and automate web traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress offers website owners a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to grow a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your automated traffic system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media accounts and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your social media accounts in order to configure these as part of your traffic generation system.
Once you have set up and configured everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and attract new visitors to your site.
You should have pages set up with all of the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select those that will work well with your system and/or content syndication tools.
(There are many social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online platforms and RSS 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.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your own RebelMouse website.
There are various sites and platforms you can incorporate into your traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore some of these and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure your site.
Configuring WordPress
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
WordPress Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains an important and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings)
As stated in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have purposely chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services field
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section lists only one entry …
(Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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 influence traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website 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 your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Generally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to automatically notify all the update services you have listed whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Global 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 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)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
Here are some of the ways site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
To learn more about setting up WP permalinks, see this tutorial: Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that can add almost every kind of functionality to your site, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Let’s take a brief look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to increase traffic
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No site is immune from a cyber attack.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to bots and hackers.
To learn more, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web content easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index …
(Yoast SEO – WP Plugin)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing 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 visitors to easily share your content with others online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social share plugins let you select which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress – Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, some themes also give you options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes include built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing features to your website is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Additional Configuration Areas For Your WordPress Site
Last but not least in the web traffic system configuration process, are the areas that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of business online, it’s important that your site is found to comply with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article on how to quickly and easily add legal pages to your site here:
WordPress Post Tags And Categories
Post categories and tags help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which helps you get more traffic.
(Categories help search engines better classify and index your web pages, which improves traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your website’s post tags and post categories earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s tags and categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal benefits.
A Site Map Of Your Pages and Posts
A site map that lists all of your posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites 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 not the same thing. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, whereas an XML sitemap is mostly just a bunch of code that only search engine bots can read. Although Google will 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 results in increased traffic.
Configure Your Site’s 404 Page
When visitors searching for your site enter the wrong URL or click on a hyperlink pointing to a page on your website that no longer exists, they are greeted with a 404 error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
A 404 page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up on 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 fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do is post great content consistently to start driving traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of different components and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some website developers months to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is covered in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read more, click here:
This tutorial is part of an tutorial series aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business and drive traffic sustainably with a WordPress-powered website and proven web marketing strategies.
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