Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive visitors automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically start attracting web traffic is publish fresh content regularly!)
In Part Two, we focused on critical setup decisions. 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 was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this section of the series, we discuss the configuration stage of this process. We will help you understand why an expertly configured WordPress site is different than a professionally configured site, and how much work needs to be done to make sure that when everything is set up and configured, you will drive new visitors automatically as you begin to post fresh content on a regular basis to your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With business becoming ever more competitive, it’s worth looking into any opportunity you can to increase your own competitiveness online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous advantage. With an expertly configured WordPress site, your business has a significant advantage from the word “go”.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to explain the key difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does it take extra labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
To illustrate this point here’s a joke.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
All is going fine in the widget-making workshop when everything suddenly comes to a halt.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the plant manager decides to call in an expert.
The expert arrives shortly afterward and, without saying a word, walks straight towards the main control box. After staring at the schematics for 3 minutes or less, the expert then produces a tiny little hammer from his tool belt and makes a gentle tap about 3 cm from the left edge of the box.
Immediately, everything springs back to life.
The floor manager is delighted as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager receives a bill for $5,000.
Outraged and bewildered, the factory manager calls the expert. Why have they had been charged so much for so little time delivering a minimal amount of work? He then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives and is placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new visitors to their sites.
How much money did the factory stand to lose when production stopped functioning 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 the right to ask to be compensated fairly for years spent developing the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to immediately assess and fix a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your site set up so all you had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other online 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?)
While the solution to many challenges is often ridiculously simple once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than installing a website and configuring some basic settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install to get desired functionalities on your site.
- Which services need to be set up to get desired results
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure to make sure things work as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this part of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite complicated. This is because it’s not as simple as installing one or two plugins, configuring some settings in your admin area or clicking on a button or two … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a process that involves your web hosting server, your website, and various external sites and/or online services …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram of the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at these steps.
Configuring The Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings in your server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic you will attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include things like integrating spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up 404 error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these, the next step is to configure various third-party sites and/or online services.
External Accounts
The concept behind setting up external sites is that all content will get published to a central location (your site) and from there, it will be automatically distributed to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external services have been added to your traffic network, content with links pointing back to your site gets automatically fed to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and site will be given additional exposure to a new audience and source of traffic.
Some of these third-party web properties and online solutions will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site’s settings to speed up the configuration 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:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Search Console lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with essential data, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your Google Webmaster Tools account and entering site details, you can use the account information to integrate and automate 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 website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account, you can add traffic tracking information to all of your pages in WordPress via a plugin and send data instantly to many other online applications and web properties.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account and entering site details with Bing, use this information with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your automated web traffic system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your various social 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 drive new traffic to your site.
You should have accounts and pages set up with all of the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up and syndicate your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work with your system and/or content syndication tools (we will review some of these tools in more detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online web platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary-level sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your RebelMouse account.
There are various sites and platforms you can add to your web traffic system. Please contact us if you would like to explore this area further and discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up accounts with third-party sites, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress Traffic 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 of the important areas.
Global Settings
Your WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains an important and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As stated in the Update Services 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, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services text box
By default, only one service is listed …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section and WordPress takes care of the rest …
(You can 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 influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to get 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 in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Typically, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to automatically notify various update services whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
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 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the options for configuring your post permalinks …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, see this tutorial: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs
Plugin Settings
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality to your site, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Let’s 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 matter what type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, web security is something you cannot afford to ignore.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and bots.
More information:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web content easier for search engines like Google to index …
(WP Plugins For SEO – 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, crawl and index, it allows you to specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with members of their own social communities can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you publish content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with WordPress plugins.
Most social sharing plugins let you select 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 plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your pages which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, some themes also include options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons to your pages is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons to enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Additional Configuration Areas For WordPress Sites
Last but not least in the configuration process, are the elements that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business as more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of business online, you need to make sure that your website is compliant with government regulations.
(Does Your Site Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help understanding how to quickly add legal pages to your WordPress website, go here:
Post Tags & Post Categories
Categories & post tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your web pages.
(WordPress post categories help to improve your site’s search optimization, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s tags and categories should be set up during the Website Planning Stages.
When looking at ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s categories and tags have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites discover more of your website 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 are web pages that provide users with a an understandable map of how your content is structured, while XML sitemaps are code that only search bots can read. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which plugins 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 404 Page Not Found
When visitors enter the wrong URL into their browser or click on a hyperlink pointing to an incorrect destination on your website, they will normally be greeted with an error – page not found message …
(Default WordPress 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up on your web server, there are several plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do then to automatically bring more traffic is publish new content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of various components and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The skills and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some web professionals months to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as you can. This step is explained in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section Three
To keep reading about this topic, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help you learn how to grow your business and drive traffic automatically with a WordPress website or blog and proven online marketing methods.
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