Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive traffic automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One 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 start generating more web traffic is post web content regularly!)
In Part Two, 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 existing website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we discuss the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. The focus of this section is to help you understand why an expertly configured site is different, and how much work is required to make sure that when all is set up and fully configured, web traffic will automatically start flowing as you begin publishing web content to your site.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With competition becoming progressively tougher businesses are looking for every advantage they believe will help them get better results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge competitive advantage. For business owners, 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 an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to explain the difference:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does it take extra labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special kind of expertise.
Allow me to illustrate this with an amusing anecdote.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
Everything was going fine in the widget-making plant when things suddenly ground to a halt.
As no one could figure out what happened, the manager decided to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert immediately walked towards the main control box. After staring at the wires and circuitry for no more than 3 minutes or so, the expert then produced a tiny hammer from his utility belt and made a single tap near the left-hand side of the box.
Immediately, everything started working as before.
The floor manager was overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the factory manager received an invoice for the sum of $5,000.
The factory manager called the expert, demanding to know why the expert had charged them so much for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrived in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving new traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to get paid fairly for investing years developing the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WordPress blog set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest 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 attracting new visitors to your site?)
Although many experts often make complex things look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy when you try to figure things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than just installing a website and configuring basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install to add specific functionalities to your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up to achieve desired results
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure to make sure everything will work as you have imagined, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite involved. It’s not just about installing one or two plugins, clicking a button, or 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 different parts including your web hosting server, your website, and a number of third-party sites and services …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing all the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these steps.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about tweaking settings in your server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic you may attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for good and unwanted traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like configuring server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up 404 redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites.
External Web Properties And Services – Configuration
The purpose of setting up external sites is that all of your content will be posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it will be automatically distributed to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external services have been added to your traffic network, content linking back to your website is automatically added to search, social and aggregator sites. Your site will then receive additional exposure online, helping your business tap into new sources of traffic.
Some sites will need to be set up before configuring your site to help 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 site’s settings:
Google Webmasters
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with essential information, tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account with Google, the details can be used to automate web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your Once you have set up Google Analytics, you can add your account code to WordPress via a simple plugin and send data automatically to various other useful 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 is with Bing are set up, use this information with web traffic 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 the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option 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 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 system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and attract new traffic 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.
Once you have set up and configured 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.
You should have accounts and profiles set up with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools (we will look at some of these tools in more detail further below and during the Automation phase).
(There are loads of social sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different users.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute your content to social networks)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your own RebelMouse website.
There are various solutions you can add to your traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore some of these further and discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up third-party service accounts, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Site
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
Global Settings
Your WordPress admin area contains a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains a powerful and frequently overlooked traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As described below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have specifically chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services text area
By default, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(You can 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
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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 on this page can have an influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers 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 get the rest of the content from a partial feed, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as traffic is concerned, however, the main setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to ping various update services when a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, make sure this box is left 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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings enable WordPress to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
Here are some of the ways your site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring post permalinks)
We have created a detailed tutorial about using WordPress permalinks here: Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings For Traffic Generation
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help drive more traffic
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you cannot ignore the importance of securing your site.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and bots.
More info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your website more search engine friendly)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with others can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Most social share 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 followers), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which visitors can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, some themes also provide built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) can be configured for better traffic results)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing features to your pages is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons to enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic Configuration – Other Steps
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic blueprint configuration process, are the components that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for both good and bad traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you are making money online, you need to make sure that your website remains compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate online business practices.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, go here:
Post Tags And Categories
Post tags & categories help search engines index your web pages, which helps you get more traffic.
(WordPress post categories help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which helps you get more traffic.)
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 Process.
When configuring your website or blog to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post categories and tags have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits.
Add A Site Map
A site map that displays all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools find more of your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. Although Google can index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Your Site’s 404 Page Not Found
When visitors searching for your site type in the wrong web address into their browser or click on links pointing to pages on your website that no longer exist, they will typically be greeted with an error – page not found message (known as a 404 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 web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your web server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your site fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do then to automatically start generating more traffic is add new content on a regular basis.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of different elements and web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of skills and expertise required to perform the configuration process typically takes some website developers a long time to learn.
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 explained in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 3
To keep reading this article, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively and drive traffic sustainably using a WordPress-powered website and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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