Welcome to Part Three of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 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 automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to generate more web traffic is post new content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase of the blueprint. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this section, we will discuss the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. We explain what makes an expertly configured WordPress site different, and just what type of work is required to make sure that when all is fully set up and configured, you will attract visitors automatically when you begin to post new content to your website.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive and are exploring any advantage they can to get better results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand is a huge advantage over other competitors. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website means having a significant advantage from the very beginning.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here’s one way to explain the main difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a web presence and an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with an 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 type of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing little story.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
All was humming along in the gizmo-making plant when everything suddenly came to a stop.
As no one could figure out what happened, the floor manager decided to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrived and walked immediately towards the main control box. After staring silently at the wiring board for 2 minutes or less, the expert then produced a teensy-weensy hammer from his pocket and made a gentle tap near the right corner of the box.
Immediately, everything returned once again to normal.
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 manager received an invoice for $5,000.
The factory manager dialled the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged such a ludicrous fee for less than five minutes work. He then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrived and was placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic to their sites.
How much money did the factory 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 the right to get paid fairly for investing years developing the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to quickly fix a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a web site configured so all you had to do is publish new content and search engines, social networks and dozens of other traffic-generating web properties would be immediately 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 website?)
Although the solution to many challenges may seem quite simple once it’s been implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring some basic settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed to get desired functionalities on your site.
- Which 3rd-party services need to be set up to achieve certain outcomes
- Which settings need to be configured in order to make sure things function as expected, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite involved and complicated. The reason why is because it’s not as simple as installing and configuring a piece of software, configuring some options and settings in your dashboard area … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration phase is a process that involves your web server, your web site, and various third-party sites and online services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we create a simple diagram showing the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic diagram of the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these steps in more detail.
Configuring Your Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for website installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings in your server specifically for handling web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your website may attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for good and unwelcome traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like implementing server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
After fine-tuning your server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of third-party sites.
External Web Properties And Accounts – Configuration
The purpose of choosing external sites is that all content will get published to one central location (your site) and from there, it will get syndicated automatically to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After incorporating these external sites into your traffic network, content linking back to your site will be automatically syndicated to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and website will receive added exposure online, helping your business tap into a new audience and traffic source.
Some of the sites and online solutions will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress site’s settings to 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 before configuring your WordPress site’s settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Webmasters lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with essential data, tools and reports about your website.
Once your account with Google Search Console are set up, this information can be used to integrate and automate traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
After setting up your Once you have set up your Google Analytics account, you can add traffic monitoring information to all of your web pages in WordPress using a plugin and send data automatically to various other applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account and entering site details with Bing, use the account information to automate traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers both the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, 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 these features into your automated web traffic system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need your social media and social bookmarking 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 get new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have pages set up with all the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose the ones that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online web platforms and content aggregators that can act as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your account.
There are various solutions you can incorporate into your traffic system. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up external service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
The WordPress administration area contains a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As stated below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services box
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is available …
(Writing Settings – WordPress Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list containing all of the update services you want notified to this section and WordPress takes care of 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 have an 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 affect someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to view the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as your traffic system is concerned, however, the most important setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.
Typically, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to ping various update services whenever new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Global Settings – 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 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the options for configuring your permalinks …
(Configuring post permalinks)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings For Traffic Generation
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for handling 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, web security is something you cannot ignore.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to botnet and hacker attacks.
Go here to learn more:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving improving the way search engines like Google and Bing find, crawl and index your web pages …
(WP SEO Plugin – Yoast SEO)
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 website easier for search engines like Google to find and index, it also lets you specify how to display your content to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins to choose from.
Most social share plugins let you choose which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which visitors can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring layout and design elements of your website, many themes also provide built-in features that let you improve SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a free theme) include built-in traffic optimization features)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your pages is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic System Configuration – Other Things To Consider
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and unwanted traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online, you need to make sure that your website remains compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Or Blog Legally Compliant?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, see this article:
WordPress Categories & Tags
WordPress post tags & categories help search engines better organize and index your pages, which helps to increase traffic.
(Post categories help search engines better organize and index your web pages, which improves traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s tags and categories should be discussed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stages.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories you have set up.
Site Map
A site map that displays all of your posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites find your online content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. HTML site maps provide readers with a visual map of how your content is structured, while XML sitemaps are mostly just a bunch of code that only search bots can understand. Although Google can index your site just from 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 Lose Traffic!
When online visitors type in the wrong web address or click on a hyperlink pointing to a destination on your site that no longer exists, they will normally be greeted with an error – page not found message …
(A 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up on your server, there are several WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do to automatically start generating web traffic is publish content on a regular basis.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of different components and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The skills and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take 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 explained in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section 3
To keep reading, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of articles designed to help site owners learn how to grow their business and drive traffic organically with a WordPress-powered website and proven marketing methods that are easy and quick to implement.
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