Welcome to Part Three of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated web traffic generating machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One 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 automatically attract new traffic is publish fresh content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase. We helped you understand 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 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 look at the configuration stage of this process. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site so you can automatically begin bringing visitors whenever you publish fresh content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With competition making business survival increasingly more difficult businesses are researching every advantage they can that can help you get better results online.
Having the ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a huge advantage over other competitors. For business owners, having an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start as soon as their website is launched.
The Configuration Stage Is What Makes All The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to describe the differences:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a web presence plus an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does it take additional labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special type of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing anecdote.
Knowing Where To Tap
All is going well in the widget assembly line when all of a sudden, everything comes to a stop.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the floor manager decides to call in an expert.
Soon afterward, the expert arrives and walks straight towards the main control box. After staring silently at the box for less than 2 minutes, the expert then takes out a tiny little hammer and makes a very gentle tap about two and half inches from the bottom-right corner of the unit.
Immediately, the assembly line starts working once more.
The floor manager is filled with joy as he thanks the expert, who leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a service bill for $5,000.
Bewildered, the factory manager rings the expert. Demanding to know why they were expected to pay so much for less than 5 minutes work, he then requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrives in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive traffic consistently to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the factory stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one on the factory floor had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to be compensated fairly for having invested years developing the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your site configured so all you had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other web properties would be instantly notified, how much time and money would you save?
(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 challenges can seem ridiculously simple once it’s been implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few internal settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up to achieve specific results
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure in order to ensure that things work 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 complicated. The reason why is because it’s not as simple as installing a plugin, configuring some settings in your admin area … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration phase involves the integration of different parts including your server, your site, and a number of third-party sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified diagram showing the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a brief look at these areas.
Your Web 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). We’re talking about tweaking settings and options in your web server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic your site can attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage 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 includes things like server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email 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 (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of third-party sites and services.
External Sites
The concept behind choosing external sites is that all content should be published to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, radiate outwards to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external sites have been added to your system, content with links pointing back to your website is automatically syndicated to these platforms. Your content and business will receive added exposure online, helping you tap into a whole new audience and source of traffic.
Some sites and online platforms will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site’s settings to speed up the configuration process 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 Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of important information, SEO tools, and reports about their website.
Once your account with Google Search Console have been set up, this information can be used with web traffic 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 performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrals, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account and site details, you can add traffic tracking code to all of your web pages in WordPress using a Google Analytics plugin and send data automatically to various other online applications and web properties.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your account is with Bing have been set up, this information can be used with web traffic-related settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers website owners a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you are planning to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your web traffic system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your various social media 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 accounts and get new visitors to your site.
Set up profiles with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can You can syndicate your content to many social sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick those that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging technology platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary-level sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add a feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your RebelMouse social feed.
There are many different technologies and third-party applications that can be incorporated into your own web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Web Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
Your WordPress administration area contains a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and often overlooked traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Section)
As stated in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely chosen to prevent 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 listed …
(Writing Settings – WordPress Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress – just add a list of all the update services you want to notify as soon as you publish a new post 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 influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your site 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 most important setting in this section as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows your site to instantly ping various update services whenever new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow your site to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s post permalinks …
(Configuring permalinks)
If you need help setting up WordPress permalinks, refer to this tutorial: Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks
WordPress Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality imaginable to your site, including traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender Security Plugin
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, you simply cannot ignore the importance of securing your sites.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to hackers and botnets.
More information:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your site more search engine friendly …
(WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s search engine optimization. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index, it also gives you control over how your content is presented to Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content with their own networks can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
There are loads of free or inexpensive social sharing plugins to choose from.
Many social sharing plugins let you choose which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some plugins even allow you to protect content which users can unlock by liking your page.
Theme Settings
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 the layout and design of your site, many themes also provide options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons to your pages is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons and enabling the feature …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Other Areas To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the traffic configuration process, are the areas that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in traffic 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 begin to visit your website.
If you are making money online (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your site is compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Compliant?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, see this article:
Post Tags And Post Categories
Post categories & post tags help search engines better organize and index your web pages, which helps to increase traffic.
(Categories help search engines better organize and index your 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 Stage.
When looking at ways 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 site map that lists all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools discover more of your web content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. Although search engines like Google can 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 can result in increased traffic.
Your WordPress 404 Page
When visitors searching online for your site enter the wrong web address or click on hyperlinks pointing to an incorrect destination on your site, they will typically be presented with an error – page not found message (known as a 404 error page) …
(A WordPress 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your website or blog has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do to bring traffic is add web content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of various elements and web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The skills and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take many web developers a long time to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is explained in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive article series designed to help you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively using a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven marketing methods that are easy to implement.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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