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 machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to bring more traffic is post content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase. We explained 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 website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we look at the configuration phase of this process. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site so you can ensure that new traffic will automatically start flowing simply by regularly adding fresh content on your web site.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many business owners as their greatest challenge online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive and are exploring any advantage available to increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a huge competitive advantage. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website means having an immediate 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 its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to describe the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only are more steps required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
Knowing Where To Tap
All is going just fine in the widget assembly workshop when all of a sudden, everything grounds to a stop.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the plant manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Soon afterward, the expert arrives and, without saying a word, heads out immediately to the main control box. After staring at the schematics for 3 minutes or less, the expert then produces a tiny hammer and makes a single tap near the top-right side of the box.
Immediately, the assembly line springs back to life.
The floor manager is grateful and relieved as he thanks the expert, who leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a bill for $5,000.
Bewildered and bordering on a sense of outrage, the manager dials the expert. Demanding to know why they were charged so much for so little time spent 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 on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive visitors to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the factory floor was able to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for years spent developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to assess and avert a serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your website set up so all you have 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 this save you?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
Although experts often make difficult things look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than just installing a website and configuring settings for the client. It involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install to get various functionalities on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up and activated to achieve desired results
- Which options you need to configure to make sure everything functions as expected, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not so technically difficult, but it’s quite complicated. This is because it’s not as easy as installing a solution, configuring some options and settings in your dashboard area or clicking on a button or two … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration stage is a complex process that involves your web hosting server, your site, and a number of external sites …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If the activities involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified diagram of the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for site installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is configuring settings in your server specifically for handling web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic your site can attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like configuring spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
After your server settings have been fine-tuned and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites.
External Services
The basic idea of choosing external sites is that all of your content will be posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will get distributed automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once you add these external sites to your configuration, content linked back to your site is automatically posted to search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and business will be given added exposure to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some web properties and online services will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress 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:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Search Console lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with essential information, SEO tools and reports about your website.
Once your account and site data are set up, use this information with traffic-related settings 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 behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
After setting up your up your account and entered your site data, you can add traffic tracking code to WordPress using plugins and feed data instantly to various other useful applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your account and site details with Bing Webmaster Tools are set up, the information can be used with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful 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 this into your traffic system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need your social media and social bookmarking accounts set up before you can 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 and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have pages set up with all of the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose those that will work with your system and/or content syndication tools (we will cover some of these tools in more detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to loads of social bookmarking sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute your content to social networks)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your RebelMouse page.
There are many different sites and platforms you can incorporate into your web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Web Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
The WordPress administration area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most powerful and often overlooked traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(Global Settings – 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 intentionally chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services field
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section lists only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of all the update services you want to notify as soon as you publish a new post to this section …
(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 your content gets seen by readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can have an influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could play a part in someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your 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.
As far as traffic is concerned, however, the most important setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Generally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to notify various update services when new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, make sure this box is left 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 sites 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Permalinks enable your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s permalinks …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
We have written a detailed tutorial on using permalinks in WordPress here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your 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, you simply cannot afford to ignore the importance of securing your sites.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and botnets.
For more information, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving improving the way search engines find, crawl and index your website …
(WP Plugin – Yoast SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages 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 Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with their social networks can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site using WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social share plugins allow you to specify which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which users can unlock by liking your page.
Configuring Settings – WordPress Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, many themes also include built-in options for improving SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for better traffic results)
With many themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your content is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Other Areas To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic system configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with 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 do business online (or plan to), it’s important that your site stays compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?)
We have created a detailed article about why it’s important to have a legally compliant website here:
Tags And Categories
Post tags and post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your web pages.
(WordPress post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your website.)
As we recommend in this article, your website’s post tags and categories should be reviewed and set up during the Website Planning Process.
When configuring your web site to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the categories and tags you have set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites find your site’s 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 two different things. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – Don’t Forget To Configure This Too!
When online visitors enter the wrong URL or click on hyperlinks pointing to destinations on your site that no longer exist, they will typically be presented with a 404 error page …
(A 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up on your server, there are several plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your site fully set up and expertly configured, all you then need to do to begin attracting traffic is publish new content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of various components and external web properties …
(WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many website professionals a long time to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as you can. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read more, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively and drive traffic sustainably using a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven web marketing strategies.
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