Welcome to Part Three of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated traffic generating machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is add web content on a regular basis to automatically attract new web traffic!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase of this process. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we look at the configuration stage of the traffic system. We will explain what makes an expertly configured WordPress site different than a professionally configured one, and how much work needs to be done to ensure that when everything is fully set up and configured, you can automatically bring visitors when you post new content to your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration Phase
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by business owners as the greatest challenge they face online. With competition making business survival increasingly more difficult businesses are looking for any advantage available to increase their competitiveness online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge advantage over other competitors. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website means having an immediate advantage from the word “go”.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
There is a significant 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 take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here is a simple way to understand the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does it take additional work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special kind of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this point here’s an amusing anecdote.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
Everything is going just fine in the widget factory when suddenly, things comes to a stop.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the manager decides to call in an expert.
Promptly after arriving, the expert immediately goes to the control box. After staring silently at the control unit for less than 3 minutes, the expert then takes out a tiny hammer from his tool belt and makes a very gentle tap about three cm from the bottom-right corner of the control unit.
Immediately, everything comes back to life.
The manager is overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the manager receives a request of payment for services for $5,000.
Furious, the manager rings the expert. Demanding to know why they have been charged such a large amount of money for less than five minutes work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice 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 number one challenge most businesses face online is driving visitors to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one in the business had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have every right to be compensated fairly for having invested years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to assess and avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WP website or blog set up and configured so all you had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other web 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 website?)
While many experts often make difficult situations and problems look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few internal settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which services need to be set up and activated to achieve certain outcomes
- Which settings need to be configured in order to make sure everything functions as envisioned, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This part of the traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite complicated. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing and configuring a solution, clicking on a button or two, or configuring some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of various different parts including your web server, your site, and various third-party sites …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram showing all the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine what’s involved in more detail.
Configuring Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is configuring settings and options in your server that affect how your website will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, 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 web traffic your site will attract will be unwelcome 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 bad traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like integrating server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirections, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites.
Integration With External Accounts
The basic idea of choosing external sites is that all content will be posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will be distributed automatically to other parts of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external sites have been added to your traffic system, content linking back to your site will be automatically added to search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and website benefits from increased exposure online, helping your business tap into new sources of traffic.
Some of the sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress settings to help save time and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts before configuring your WordPress settings:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Webmasters lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with useful information, SEO tools, and reports about their website.
Once your account with Google Webmasters are set up, you can use your details with traffic-related 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 traffic results, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account has been set up, you can add traffic monitoring code to all of your pages in WordPress via a simple Google Analytics plugin and send data automatically to other online applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account, use this information to automate web traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers website owners a self-hosted (WordPress.org) and a hosted (WordPress.com) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, 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 this into your automated web traffic system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and bring new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social accounts set up 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 accounts and get new visitors to your site.
You should set up accounts with all of the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can set up accounts with and syndicate your content to. 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 cover some of these tools in greater detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to lots of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online web platforms and content aggregators that can act as second-tier sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
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 website.
There are various platforms you can add to your traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Web Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
Global Settings – WordPress
Your WordPress admin area contains a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Screen)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains an important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As stated below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally configured your settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the list of services entered into the Update Services field
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section displays only one entry …
(Writing Settings – WordPress Update Services)
You can 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 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
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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 in this section can influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to read the rest of the content from summaries, 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 checkbox is enabled or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to automatically ping various update services whenever a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings)
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 articles, 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)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks Section)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s permalinks …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, see this tutorial: Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks
Configuring Settings – Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that can add just about every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Let’s 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 website for dealing with the effects of 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 afford to ignore the importance of securing your web site.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to hackers and botnets.
Go here for more information:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web pages easier for search engines to index …
(SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
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 site easier for search engines like Google to index, it allows you to specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with members of their own online communities can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
You can easily add social sharing to your site using WordPress plugins.
Most social plugins let you specify which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which users can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress Traffic Theme Features – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring layout and design elements of your website, many themes also give you built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) allow you to configure settings for better traffic results)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your content is as easy as clicking a few buttons to configure your options and enable the function …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Other Areas To Configure For Increased Traffic
Last (but by no means least) in the traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can hurt your business as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of business online (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your website stays compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Comply With The Law?)
If you need help understanding the importance of having a compliant website, go here:
WordPress Categories And Tags
WordPress post categories & tags help improve traffic by improving your site’s SEO.
(WordPress categories help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to discuss and set up your site’s post tags and categories earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
When considering ways to automate and improve web traffic, 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 benefits and results.
Add A Site Map
A visitor site map that lists all of your site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools find more of your online content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although Google will index your pages just from 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.
404 Page – A Source Of Lost Traffic Opportunities!
When visitors type in the wrong URL or click on a link pointing to a page on your website that no longer exists, they are presented with a 404 Not Found error page …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
A 404 Not Found error page can be turned into a useful source of traffic to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up on your web server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your website fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do is post fresh content consistently to automatically bring more web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of various components and external web properties …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise required to perform the configuration process can take many website professionals months to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is addressed in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read more, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive article series designed to help website owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively and drive traffic organically with a WordPress-driven website and proven web marketing methods.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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