Welcome to Part Three of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive visitors automatically to your website using WordPress.
In Part One 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 traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is publish fresh content on a consistent basis to begin bringing more web traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In this article, we discuss the configuration phase of this process. You will learn how a WordPress site should be configured in order to attract visitors automatically as you begin to publish new content on your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive and are looking for any advantage available to get better results online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous advantage. Having an expertly configured WordPress site gives you a flying start and an immediate competitive advantage online.
The Configuration Phase Is What Makes All The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to describe the difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does it take extra work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing story.
Knowing Where To Tap
Things are going fine in the gizmo assembly factory when everything grinds to a sudden stop.
No one can figure out what is wrong and so the floor manager decides to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert heads immediately towards the control box. After staring silently at the wiring diagrams for 5 minutes or so, the expert then takes out a little hammer and makes a single tap about three cm from the top-left side of the control unit.
Immediately, everything begins to work once more.
The floor manager is filled with joy as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager receives an invoice for the sum of $5,000.
Angry and confused, the manager dials the expert. Demanding to know why they were expected to pay so much for so little time spent delivering such minimal amount of work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives and is placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive new visitors to their sites.
How much money did the 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 be compensated fairly for investing years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to assess and repair a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a blog set up so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social networking sites and dozens of other online 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 website?)
Although many experts often make difficult solutions look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring basic settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install to get specific functionalities on your site.
- Which third-party services you need to set up and activate to get desired results
- Which settings need to be configured to make sure everything functions how you would like, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite complicated. The reason why is because it’s not just about installing and configuring one or two plugins, configuring some settings in your admin area or clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of different parts including your server, your website, and a number of external sites …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram of all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at these areas in more detail.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for website installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings and options in your hosting account that affect how your website will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic you can attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for both good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like configuring server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been fine-tuned and configured (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites.
Configuring External Services
The idea behind setting up external sites is that all of your content will get published 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 services.
After adding these external sites to your setup, content linking back to your website will get automatically syndicated to search, social and aggregator sites. Your website will then be exposed to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some sites will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress 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 before configuring your site’s settings:
Google Webmasters
(Google Search Console)
Google Search Console lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with a range of important information, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account and site details with Google have been set up, use your details to automate web traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s traffic performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
After setting up your Once you have set up Google Analytics, your account information can be easily integrated with WordPress using plugins and automatically fed to various other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your account and site data are set up, the information can be used to integrate and automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers users the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to build a professional online presence for your business.
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 these features into your automated web traffic system in Part Four of this series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site)
You will need your social accounts set up in order to 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 bring new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts and profiles set up with all the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with and syndicate your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose those that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we cover some of these tools in greater detail further below and during the Automation phase).
(There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary-level sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free levels, 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 a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your website.
There are various platforms that can be incorporated into your own 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 service accounts, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress Site Configuration
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 key areas.
Global WordPress Settings
By default, your WordPress dashboard area includes a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most powerful and often overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings)
As described in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically configured your settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the update services entered into the Update Services section
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section displays only one entry …
(Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section and WordPress will do the rest …
(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
***
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 in this section can have an influence web traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could play a part in someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your site to read 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 most important setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is ticked or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to instantly ping your list of update services when a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion
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 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the ways post permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring post permalinks)
We have created a detailed tutorial about using permalinks in WordPress here: Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings For Traffic Generation
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that can add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Here are 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 handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No website or blog is safe from being hacked.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to bots and hackers.
To learn more, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your site more search engine friendly …
(SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your site’s SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index, it allows you to configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if your site provides content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins available for WordPress users.
Most social plugins let you select which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings For Traffic Generation
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, many themes also provide built-in options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your pages is as easy as clicking a few buttons to configure your options and enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Configuring Other WordPress Settings For More Traffic
Last (but by no means least) in the WordPress traffic system configuration process, are the areas that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can damage 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 site remains compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, see this article:
WordPress Tags And Categories
Post categories and post tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your web pages.
(WordPress post categories help search engines better classify and index your pages, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s tags and categories should be set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal benefits and results.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites discover your web content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. Although Google will index your site just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – Don’t Forget To Configure This Too!
When visitors searching for your website enter the wrong URL into their web browser or click on an invalid hyperlink, they are presented with a 404 Not Found page …
(Default WordPress 404 Error Page)
A 404 page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional web 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 server, there are several plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your website or blog fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do is post new content consistently to begin attracting new web traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of various elements and web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The 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 article in our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Part Three
To continue reading, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help site owners learn how to grow their business with a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven web marketing methods.
Subscribe Using The Form Below And Get Notified Of New Tutorials!
***
"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com
***