Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a site into an automated web traffic generating machine using WordPress.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is add web content on a regular basis to automatically start attracting traffic!)
In Part 2, we focused on critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In this article, we will look at the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. You will learn why an expertly configured WordPress site is different. You will also discover what type of work needs to be done to make sure that when all is fully configured, you can automatically begin driving new visitors when you start posting web content on your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Also, the business landscape is becoming ever more competitive and businesses are researching any and every opportunity they can to improve their performance and results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand is a tremendous competitive advantage. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website allows their business to get off with a flying start from the moment their site is launched.
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 an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here is a simple way to describe the difference:
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 system!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this point here’s an anecdote.
A Semi-True Story …
All was running smoothly in the widget workshop when things suddenly ground to a stop.
As no one could figure out what happened, the manager decided to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrived and immediately went towards the control box. After staring at the wires and circuitry for about 2 minutes, the expert then produced a little hammer from his pocket and made a gentle tap about 2 cm from the left side of the control unit.
Immediately, everything started working once again.
The manager was greatly relieved as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the manager received a request of payment for services for the amount of $5,000.
The factory manager rang back the expert, demanding to know why the expert had charged them such an exorbitant fee for less than five minutes work. He then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrived in the manager’s intray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive traffic consistently to their sites.
How much money did the plant stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one on the factory floor had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to ask to be compensated fairly for having spent years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to avert a serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a site configured so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other traffic-generating web 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 website?)
Although the solution to many problems often seems ridiculously easy once implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than just installing a website and configuring a few internal settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install to get certain functionalities on your site.
- Which services you need to set up and activate to get certain outcomes
- Which settings you need to configure to ensure that processes will work as you have imagined, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this part of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically difficult, it can be quite involved. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing and configuring a piece of software, tweaking some options and settings in your dashboard area or clicking a button … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many parts including your web hosting server, your website, and various external sites and online services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we try to flowchart all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a better look at what’s involved.
Web Hosting
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is configuring settings and options in your web server that affect how you will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your hosting account settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic your website may attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include things like configuring spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
After your server settings have been fine-tuned and configured, the next step is to set up and configure a number of third-party sites and services.
External Sites
The purpose of setting up external sites is that all content should be published to a central location (your site) and from there, it will get syndicated automatically to other components of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After incorporating these external sites into your system, content with links pointing back to your website gets automatically added to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and site will be exposed to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some of the third-party sites and online services will need to be set up before configuring your site to help save time 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 site’s settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Search Console lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with essential information, SEO tools and reports about your website.
After setting up your account with Google Search Console, this information can be used with web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, your account information can be added to all of your pages in WordPress using a simple plugin and and sent to other useful applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. After setting up your account, use this information with web traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers both a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your traffic generation system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and get new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your social media and social bookmarking accounts before you can configure these as part of your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and bring new traffic to your site.
You should have pages set up with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are many social sites you can syndicate your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose those that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we cover some of these tools in more detail during the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to lots of social bookmarking sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online platforms and content aggregators that can serve as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different users.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add an RSS feed from your WordPress blog …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your own RebelMouse account.
There are various technologies and third-party applications that can be added to your web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server 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 site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
Your WordPress admin area contains a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains an important and often overlooked traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – 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 specifically configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the update services entered into the Update Services box
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section lists only one entry …
(Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section …
(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
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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 visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can have an influence web traffic. For example, your choice to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could impact 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 check box is ticked or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables your site to instantly notify various update services when new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Settings Menu – 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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings enable your site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
Here are some of the ways your site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring post permalinks)
We have written a detailed tutorial about using WordPress permalinks here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO With Permalinks
WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins – Configuration
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that can add just about every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, 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 Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No blog is guaranteed immunity from being attacked by hackers.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to hackers and botnets.
For more details, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving improving the way search engines like Google find and index your web pages …
(SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive traffic by improving your website’s SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google to find, classify and index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with their networks can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if your site provides content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with WordPress plugins)
You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive plugins.
Most social plugins allow you to choose which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring WordPress Traffic Features In Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, some themes also provide options for improving SEO and site linking structure for faster indexing, add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes can be configured for better traffic results)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your content is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic Automation – Additional Configuration
Last but not least in the traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good 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 business online (or plan to), you need to make sure that your website stays compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Site Compliant?)
To learn more about how to quickly add legal pages to your WordPress website, refer to this article:
Tags & Post Categories
WordPress post categories & tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your pages.
(WordPress categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your website.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s categories and tags should be reviewed and set up during the Website Planning Phase.
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.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications discover your online content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. Although Google can index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Your 404 Page
When online visitors enter the wrong URL or click on a link pointing to an incorrect destination on your website, they will normally be greeted with a 404 error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error 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 Stage – Summary
Once your website has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do then to automatically start generating new web traffic is post web content consistently.
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 external web properties …
(WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise required to perform this process can take some website developers a long time to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is explained in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read more, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping site owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively and drive traffic organically with a WordPress website or blog and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
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