Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a site into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to automatically drive more traffic is publish new content regularly!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will discuss the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. We will show you how to configure a WordPress site so you can automatically attract new visitors as you begin to add web content on your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by business owners as their greatest challenge online. With competition becoming increasingly more difficult businesses are exploring every opportunity they can to get better results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous advantage over other competitors. Having an expertly configured WordPress site gives you a significant competitive advantage from the word “go”.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s a simple way to explain the differences:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does it take more work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
Let me illustrate this with a little story.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
All is moving along in the gizmo-making manufacturing plant when things come to a sudden stop.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert immediately walks to the main control box. After staring silently at the electronic components for what seems like 2 minutes or so, the expert then produces a tiny hammer and makes a gentle tap near the left corner of the box.
Immediately, all the machinery comes back to life.
The plant manager is relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager receives a request of payment for services for the amount of $5,000.
Furious, the factory manager dials the expert. Why have they had been charged so much for less than 5 minutes work? He then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive traffic to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when the machines stopped working and no one on the factory floor had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to demand fair compensation for having spent years building up the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and repair a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a blog set up and configured so all you had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other online 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?)
Although the solution to many problems is often ridiculously easy in hindsight, it rarely is that simple or easy when you try to work things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than installing a website and configuring some basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install to add desired functionalities to your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up to achieve desired results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured in order to ensure that things function to plan, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this part of the traffic automation system may not seem so technically difficult, it can be quite complicated. It’s not just about installing and configuring a piece of software, tweaking some settings in your admin area … it’s all this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many parts such as your web hosting server, your WordPress site, and various third-party sites …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we were to create a simplified diagram of the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine what’s involved.
Configuring Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for website installation purposes. What we are talking about, is fine-tuning 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 checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your business can attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for good and unwelcome traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include things like configuring server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
Once your server settings have been fine-tuned and configured (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites.
Integration With External Sites
The concept behind setting up external sites is that all of your content will be posted to one central location (your site) and from there, it will get automatically distributed to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After incorporating these external services into your configuration, content pointing back to your website is automatically fed to these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social sites, even to users of the platform itself. Your site will be given exposure to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some of these sites will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress site to help speed up the process 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 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 a range of important data, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your account and site data with Google Search Console have been set up, you can use this information with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic results, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data are set up, traffic monitoring information can be added to WordPress using a simple plugin used with other applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your account and site data with Bing Webmaster Tools have been set up, your account details can be used with 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 a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to grow a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your automated traffic generation system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media Sites
(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.
You should have profiles set up with all of the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can You can post your content to many social sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just select those that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(You can syndicate your content to lots of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of emerging technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as second-tier sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your RebelMouse social feed.
There are various technologies and third-party applications that can be incorporated into your traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server 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 your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress Settings
The WordPress admin area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can 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 users …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As stated in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have specifically chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services section
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section includes only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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 have an influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could play a part in someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog 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 traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Generally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to ping all the update services you have listed in the Update Services section when new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Section)
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 blogs 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)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks Section)
Here are some of the ways your permalink URLs can be configured …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
If you need help setting up WordPress permalinks, refer to this tutorial: How To Change WordPress Permalinks
WP Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to bring more visitors to your site
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you simply cannot afford to ignore the importance of website security.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
To learn more, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving improving the way search engines like Google and Bing find and index your web pages …
(SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your website more search engine friendly)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find, crawl and index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with members of their own online communities can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using WordPress plugins.
Many social sharing plugins let you select which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which visitors can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Configuring Settings – WP Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring design and layout aspects of your website, many themes also provide built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a free theme) come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing features to your pages is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic Automation – Additional Configuration Areas
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic configuration process, are the components that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle good and unwanted 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, you need to make sure that your website remains compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
We have written a detailed article about how to quickly add legal pages to your website or blog here:
Post Tags & Post Categories
Tags and categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.
(WordPress post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.)
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 Phase.
In the configuration phase, 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 displays all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors 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 web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. Although search engines like Google will index your site just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – Another Source Of Traffic!
When visitors enter the wrong URL or click on an invalid link, they are greeted with an error – page not found message …
(Default WordPress 404 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 traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your server, there are plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do is publish web content consistently to begin bringing new traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise required to perform this phase of the traffic automation process typically takes many website developers a long time to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is addressed in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 3
To continue reading this article, click on the link below:
This article is part of an tutorial series aimed at helping small business owners learn how to grow their business online cost-effectively using a WordPress-driven website or blog 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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