Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to automatically bring traffic is add fresh content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase of the 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 site, and what to do if your existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In this article, we will discuss the configuration phase of this process. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site so you can drive traffic automatically whenever you post new content to your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as their greatest challenge online. With business becoming ever more competitive, it’s worth learning about any and every advantage available to improve your results and performance online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand is a huge advantage. For WordPress users, an expertly configured website means having an immediate advantage from the very beginning.
The Configuration Process Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to explain the main difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does it take extra labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
Things were going well in the gizmo-making assembly line when everything came to a sudden stop.
No one could figure out what has happened and so the floor manager decided to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert headed out immediately to the control box. After staring silently at the schematics for less than 3 minutes, the expert then took out a little hammer from his pocket and made a single tap about 3 cm from the bottom-left corner of the box.
Immediately, everything started working once again.
The manager was greatly overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager received an invoice for the sum of $5,000.
The factory manager rang back the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged so much for less than five minutes work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrived in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic to their sites.
How much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production stopped working and no one in the factory floor had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have every right to demand fair compensation for years spent developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WordPress website set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and search engines, social sites 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 attracting new visitors to your site?)
While experts often make complicated things look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves 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 plugins need to be installed to add desired functionalities to your site.
- Which services you need to set up and activate to achieve desired results
- Which settings need to be configured in order to make sure things will function to plan, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite complicated. It’s not just about installing and configuring one or two plugins, clicking on a button or two, or configuring some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration stage is a complex process that involves your web hosting server, your website or blog, and a number of external sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart of the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine what’s involved.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for site installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is tweaking settings in your server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic your site will attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both good and unwelcome traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like implementing server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these, the next step is to set up and configure a number of third-party sites or online services.
External Services
The basic idea of choosing external sites is that all content is published to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it then gets distributed automatically to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external sites have been added to your network, content linking back to your website will be automatically syndicated to search, social and aggregator sites. Your content and website will be given exposure to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of the third-party 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, you will want to set up the following accounts:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Webmasters lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with important information, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your account, this information can be used with traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s traffic performance, SEO, marketing campaigns, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrals, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account, you can add traffic tracking code to WordPress via plugins and feed data automatically to other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your Bing Webmaster Tools account and entering site details, your details can be used to integrate and automate traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress provides users with a self-hosted (WordPress.org) and a hosted (WordPress.com) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to build a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, 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 traffic generation system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your social media and social bookmarking accounts 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 bring new traffic to your site.
You should have accounts and pages set up with all the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick those that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(You can syndicate your content to loads of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your own RebelMouse account.
There are various sites and platforms that can be added to your own web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up external service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Web Site
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring WordPress Settings
The WordPress administration area contains a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains an important and frequently overlooked traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As described 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 specifically configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services section
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is listed …
(Writing Settings – WordPress Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services 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 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, choosing to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could play a part in 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 a partial feed, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The main setting here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to instantly notify all the update services you have listed when new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion
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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring permalinks)
We have written a detailed tutorial about using permalinks in WordPress here: Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks
Plugin Settings
WordPress provides users with plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to bring more visitors to your site
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site 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 website is something you 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 blog invisible to hackers and botnets.
Go here for more info:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your website’s ability to rank better in search engines)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines to find and index, it also lets you specify how to present your content to Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you post content that adds real value to readers.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily using WordPress plugins)
You can add social features to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins.
Many social share plugins let you select which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WordPress Theme Settings – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, many themes also include options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing features to your website is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons and enabling the feature …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic System Configuration – Other Areas
Last but not least in the traffic configuration process, are the components that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to your business as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online, it’s important that your website is compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Site Compliant?)
To learn more about how to quickly and easily add legal pages to your website or blog, see this article:
Post Categories And Tags
Post tags & categories help to improve your site’s SEO, which improves traffic.
(Post categories help search engines index your website, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your website’s tags and categories should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
When configuring your site to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the categories and tags that have been set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications find more of your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. 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 interpret. Although Google can index your site just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
Your WordPress 404 Page
When visitors type in the wrong URL or click on an invalid hyperlink, they will normally be presented with a 404 Not Found error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your server, there are several plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your website or blog expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then is publish great content consistently to start driving web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and web properties …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some website developers months 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 the series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of an tutorial series designed to help business owners learn how to grow their business online cost-effectively and drive traffic organically using a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven online marketing strategies.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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