Welcome to Part Three of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new visitors automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this article series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is publish content on a regular basis to automatically start generating more web traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of the automation process. 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 website, and what to do if your existing site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration stage of the traffic automation process. We will help you understand why an expertly configured site is different. You will also discover what kind of work is required to ensure that when everything is set up and fully configured, you will attract visitors automatically whenever you publish content to your website.
WordPress Traffic System – Configuration
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by business owners as their greatest challenge online. Businesses are becoming ever more competitive and are exploring any and every opportunity they can to increase their competitiveness online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge advantage over the competition. With an expertly configured WordPress site, your business has a flying start and an immediate advantage online.
The Configuration Phase Is What Makes The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here’s a simple way to understand the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does it take more work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special kind of expertise.
Let me illustrate this point with a story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All is running smoothly in the gizmo-making workshop when suddenly, things stop working.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the floor manager decides to call in an expert.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrives and, without saying a word, heads straight towards the main control box. After staring silently at the circuit board for less than 3 minutes or so, the expert then takes out a teensy-weensy little hammer from his utility belt and makes a very gentle tap about 3 inches from the top-left edge of the box.
Immediately, everything returns to normal.
The manager is greatly relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the manager receives a bill for $5,000.
With a sense of outrage, the manager rings the expert. Demanding to know why they were charged such a ludicrous fee for less than 5 minutes work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new visitors to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the factory floor was able to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have every right to demand fair compensation for spending years developing the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to repair a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your web site set up so all you had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social media and dozens of other web properties would be automatically 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 many experts often make difficult solutions look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than installing a website and configuring some basic settings. It involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins need to be installed to get desired functionalities on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up and activated to achieve desired outcomes
- Which options you need to configure to make sure everything will function as you have imagined, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite involved and complicated. It’s not as easy as installing one or two plugins, clicking a button, or configuring some settings in your dashboard area … it’s all this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of different parts including your server, your website, and various external sites or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If the activities involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these areas.
Server Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for website installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings in your web server that affect how your site will handle all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your business can attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like configuring 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?)
Once your server settings have been checked and configured, the next step is to set up and configure a number of external sites and online solutions.
Integration With External Sites
The purpose of adding external sites is that all content is posted to one central location (your site) and from there, it gets automatically distributed to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external services have been added to your setup, content pointing back to your website gets automatically published on these platforms. Your content and site will be exposed to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of these external sites and solutions will need to be set up before configuring your site to help 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 before configuring your WordPress site:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmasters)
Google Webmasters lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of essential information, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account is with Google have been set up, this information can be used 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 results, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, you can add visitor tracking information to all of your web pages in WordPress using a simple plugin and feed data automatically to various other online applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account and entering site details with Bing Webmaster Tools, use your account information to automate web traffic settings and notifications 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 option if you are planning to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, 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 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 and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your various social media and social bookmarking accounts 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 attract new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have accounts set up with all the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of emerging platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different user types.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add a feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your account.
There are various technologies and third-party applications you can incorporate into your own traffic blueprint. 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 server settings and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
Global WordPress Settings
The WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Section)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally configured your site settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services text area
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section and WordPress will do the rest …
(You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress!)
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
***
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 traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could play a part in someone’s decision 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.
As far as your traffic system is concerned, however, the main setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to automatically ping various update services whenever a new post is 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)
Discussion
Although discussion settings 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
We have written a detailed tutorial about using WP permalinks here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks
Configuring WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality to your website, including many plugins that improve 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 WordPress site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No website or blog is safe from being hacked.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to hackers and botnets.
Go here to learn more:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(SEO plugins like Yoast SEO 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 site’s SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website 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 pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can easily add social sharing features to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social share plugins let you choose which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to protect content which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings For Traffic Generation
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring design and layout elements of your site, some themes also give you built-in options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your website is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features)
Additional Areas Of WordPress To Configure For Improved Traffic Flow
Last (but by no means least) in the traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for both good and bad traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you do business online, you need to make sure that your website stays compliant with all laws and regulations.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
We have written a detailed article about how to quickly and easily add legal pages to your WordPress website or blog here:
Tags And Post Categories
Post categories and tags help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which improves traffic.
(WordPress post categories help search engines index your web pages, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to discuss and set up your website’s post tags and categories during the Website Planning Phases.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post categories and tags have been correctly set up to deliver optimal results.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A visitor site map that displays all of your site’s pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites find your web content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. Although search engines like Google can index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
Your Site’s 404 Error Page
When visitors searching for your website type in the wrong web address into their browser or click on a dead link, they are greeted with a 404 error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect 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 several WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your site has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do is publish fresh content consistently to drive more traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different components and web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The skills and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take some website professionals months to acquire.
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 covered in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read more, click on the link below:
This article is part of an tutorial series designed to help site owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively and drive traffic sustainably using a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven web marketing methods.
Get Notified When New WordPress Tutorials Get Published – Subscribe To Our Site!
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org
***