Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated traffic generation machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is post new content consistently to automatically bring more traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase of the automation 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 website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this section, we look at the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. We explain how to configure a WordPress site so you can get new visitors automatically simply by consistently posting fresh content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration Phase
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as the greatest challenge they face online. With competition making business survival progressively tougher businesses are looking for any and every opportunity they can to improve their performance online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge advantage. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website means having an immediate advantage from the very start.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to understand the differences:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only is additional labor required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
Allow me to illustrate this point with a joke.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All is going just fine in the widget factory when everything suddenly stops.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
The expert arrives shortly after being summoned and immediately heads to the main control box. After staring at the control unit for less than 5 minutes or so, the expert then takes out a teensy-weensy hammer from his tool belt and makes a very gentle tap about two inches from the left corner of the control unit.
Immediately, everything begins to work once more.
The floor manager is overjoyed 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 an invoice for $5,000.
Bewildered and angry, the manager calls the expert. Demanding to know why they were charged such a large amount of money for less than 5 minutes work, he promptly 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 main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new visitors to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when the machines 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 the right to be compensated fairly for investing years building up the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to immediately assess and repair a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress web site fully configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and search engines, social media 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 website?)
While experts often make complicated situations and problems look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than just installing a website and configuring a few settings. It involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install to add various functionalities to your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up to achieve specific results
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure to ensure that everything functions as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically difficult, but it’s quite involved and time-consuming. The reason why is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring a piece of software, clicking on a button or two, or tweaking some options and settings in your dashboard area … it’s all this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a complex process that involves your web server, your site, and a number of external sites …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we were to create a simple diagram of the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram of the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these areas.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for website installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your web server specifically for handling web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your webhosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic your business will attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for good and unwelcome traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like implementing spam protection and securing server files, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of external sites or online services.
Integration With External Accounts
The purpose of setting up external sites is that all content should be posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, be automatically distributed to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you incorporate these external services into your traffic system, content linked back to your site is automatically posted to these platforms. Your business will receive exposure online, helping you tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of these sites and online services will need to be 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 Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of important data, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account has been with Google are set up, use the details with web traffic 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 campaigns, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account, visitor tracking data can be integrated with WordPress using a simple Google Analytics plugin and automatically sent to many other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your account has been with Bing are set up, this information can be used with web traffic-related settings in WordPress 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 version if you plan to grow a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your traffic system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media 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 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 attract new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have set up accounts and profile pages with all the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are loads of social 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 with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we will cover some of these tools in greater detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(There are loads of social sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary-level sources of traffic. 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 lets you add a feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute your content to social networks)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your RebelMouse account.
There are various technologies and third-party applications that can be incorporated into your web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up third-party site accounts, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
Global WordPress Settings
By default, all WordPress installations include a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Screen)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains a powerful and often overlooked traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings)
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 chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services section
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section contains only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(You can 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 your content gets seen by readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence traffic. For example, your choice to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog 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 main setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Generally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to instantly notify the list of update services when new posts get 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 unticked …
(Settings Menu – 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 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalinks
Permalinks enable your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks Screen)
Here are some of the ways your post permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring post permalinks)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, see this tutorial: Changing Your WordPress Permalinks
Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality to your website, including traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No site is safe from being attacked by hackers.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to attacks from hackers and bots.
To learn more, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web content more indexable …
(Yoast SEO – WP Plugin)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines to index, it allows you to specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with free or inexpensive plugins.
Most social sharing plugins let you specify which 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 likes), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which visitors 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, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, many themes also give you built-in options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your website is as easy as clicking a few buttons to enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the traffic configuration process, are the components that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and unwanted traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you do any kind of business online (or plan to), it’s important that your website stays compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Site Compliant?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, see this article:
WordPress Tags And Post Categories
WordPress post tags and categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your website.
(WordPress post categories help search engines index your web pages, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s categories and tags should be reviewed and set up 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 categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal benefits and results.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A site map that lists all of your posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications find more of your site’s content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. Although Google can 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.
Configure Your Site’s 404 Page Not Found
When online users type in the wrong web address or click on an invalid link, they are greeted with a 404 Not Found error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover 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 page can be set up in your web server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do is post content regularly to generate more web traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of different elements and web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of skills and knowledge required to perform this process typically takes some web professionals months to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is explained in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of articles designed to help small business owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively using a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven online marketing strategies.
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