Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to attract more web traffic is add new content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase of the traffic automation process. We explained the best way to get started 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 website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this article, we will look at the configuration phase of the traffic automation process. We will show you how a WordPress site should be configured in order to ensure that visitors will automatically start flowing when you begin publishing content on a regular basis to your website.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. Also, the business landscape is becoming so much more competitive and businesses are looking for every opportunity they can to improve their results and performance online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge advantage over other competitors. An expertly configured WordPress site gives your business a flying start from the moment your 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 website that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s a simple way to understand the differences:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a web presence with an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does a whole lot more labor go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
Allow me to illustrate this with a story.
Knowing Where To Tap
All is humming along in the widget factory when all of a sudden, things comes to a stop.
As no one can figure out what is wrong, the manager decides to call in an expert.
Soon afterward, the expert arrives and immediately goes to the main control box. After staring at the board for about 3 minutes or so, the expert then produces a teensy-weensy hammer and makes a very gentle tap about 2 inches from the right corner of the control unit.
Immediately, the assembly line comes back to life.
The manager is greatly relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the manager receives a service bill for $5,000.
With a sense of outrage, the manager calls the expert. Demanding to know why they were charged such an exorbitant fee for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work, he then requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice arrives on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive web traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the business had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have every right to demand fair compensation for spending years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to assess and avert a serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WP site set up and configured so all you had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social sites and dozens of other web properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
While many experts often make difficult situations and problems look easy, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than installing a website and configuring settings for clients. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed to add various functionalities to your site.
- Which 3rd-party services need to be set up and activated to get desired results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured in order to ensure that things will function as envisioned, etc.
(Driving 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 complicated. This is because it’s not as simple as installing a piece of software, clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration phase is a process that involves your web hosting server, your site, and various external sites or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we were to create a simple diagram of all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the configuration phase)
Let’s take a brief look at these areas.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your hosting account for site installation purposes. What we are talking about, is configuring settings and options in your server that affect how you will handle all web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic your website can attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like implementing spam protection and securing server files, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up 404 redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page error redirections, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these, the next step is to set up and configure various external sites and online services.
External Sites & Accounts – Configuration
The purpose of adding external sites is that all of your content gets published from one central location (your site) and from there, it gets syndicated automatically to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After incorporating these external sites into your traffic network, content linking back to your site is automatically syndicated to search, social and aggregator sites. Your website will benefit from exposure online, helping your business tap into a whole new audience and traffic source.
Some of the third-party web properties and online solutions will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site’s settings 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:
Google Webmasters
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of essential data, SEO tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site details with Google, this information can be used to integrate and automate traffic-related settings in WordPress (e.g. 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 efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account has been set up, you can add tracking information to WordPress using a Google Analytics plugin and feed data automatically to many other applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your account and site data with Bing are set up, use your information with traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress provides users with the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform 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 at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your automated web traffic system in Part Four of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need your various social media accounts set up in order to integrate these with 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 get new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have set up profiles with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick those that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools (we cover some of these tools in greater detail during the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to lots of social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online web platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free 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 social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your own RebelMouse account.
There are many different platforms you can incorporate into your own traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with third-party sites, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your 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 administration area includes a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Screen)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have purposely configured your site settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services box
By default, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress – just add a list containing all of the update services you want notified to this section …
(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 your content gets seen by readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can have an influence traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could play a part in someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website to view 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 check box is enabled or not.
Normally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to instantly ping various update services when 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 …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion
Although discussion settings 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the ways your post permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring post permalinks)
We have written a detailed tutorial on using permalinks here: Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks
WordPress Plugin Settings
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that can add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help improve traffic generation
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, securing your web site is something you simply cannot afford to ignore.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to bots and hackers.
More information:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website …
(WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you post content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Most social plugins allow you to 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 likes), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings For Traffic Generation
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, many themes also give you built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many themes, adding social sharing features to your pages is as easy as clicking a few buttons to enable the function …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic Configuration – Other Don’t Forget These
Last (but by no means least) in the configuration process, are the components that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online, you need to ensure that your site complies with all government laws and regulations.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?)
To learn more about how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website, refer to this article:
Post Categories And Tags
WordPress tags and post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better organize and index your web pages.
(Post categories help to improve your site’s SEO, which improves traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and categories should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phases.
When configuring your web site to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post categories and tags that have been set up.
Site Map
A visitor site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites discover more of your web content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. Although search engines like 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 can result in increased traffic.
Don’t Forget Your Site’s 404 Error Page
When visitors searching online for your site enter the wrong URL or click on links pointing to destinations on your website that no longer exist, they are greeted with a 404 Not Found page …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
A 404 Error Page can redirect confused visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up in your server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your site expertly configured and fully set up, all you then have to do to begin attracting more web traffic is publish new content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different elements and external web properties …
(WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise required to perform the configuration process typically takes some website developers a long time to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is explained in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 3
To keep reading this article, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively and drive traffic organically with a WordPress-driven website and proven online marketing methods.
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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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