Welcome to Part Three of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new visitors automatically to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to automatically generate more web traffic is publish new content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase of the automation process. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will discuss the configuration stage of this process. You will learn how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that web traffic will automatically start flowing just by regularly posting web content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as one of their greatest challenges online. Also, the business landscape is becoming so much more competitive on a global scale and businesses are researching any advantage they can that can help you get better results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand is a huge advantage. For business owners, an expertly configured website means having a significant competitive advantage from the very start.
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 set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s a simple way to describe the main difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does it take extra work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
Allow me to illustrate this point with a joke.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
All is humming along in the widget-making assembly line when things come to a sudden stop.
No one can figure out what is wrong and so the manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrives and heads out immediately to the main control box. After staring at the wiring diagrams for no more than 2 minutes or so, the expert then produces a tiny hammer from his tool box and makes a single tap about 2 inches from the right corner of the unit.
Immediately, everything starts working once more.
The manager is grateful and relieved as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a request for payment of $5,000.
Confused and outraged, the manager calls the expert. Why were they expected to pay such a ridiculously high fee for so little time spent delivering such minimal amount of work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one in the business had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have every right to demand fair compensation for having spent years developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and fix a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress web site fully set up so all you had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other web properties would be immediately 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 driving traffic to your website?)
Although the solution to many challenges often seems quite easy once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring some basic settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins need to be installed to add specific functionalities to your site.
- Which 3rd-party services need to be set up to achieve desired results
- Which settings need to be configured to ensure that things work as envisioned, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this part of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite involved and time-consuming. This is because it’s not as simple as installing one or two plugins, tweaking some options and settings in your dashboard area or clicking a button … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration phase is a process that involves your server, your site, and a number of third-party sites and services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic diagram showing the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a better look at what’s involved.
Server Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for site installation purposes. What we are talking about, is configuring settings and options in your server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic you can attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like server-level spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up 404 redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been checked and configured (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites and online services.
Configuring External Services
The basic idea of choosing external sites is that all content gets published to one central location (your site) and from there, it then gets automatically distributed to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external services have been added to your setup, content linking back to your website gets automatically fed to these platforms, indexed by search engines and distributed to social networks, even to users of the platform itself. Your content and website will receive additional exposure online, helping your business tap into a whole new audience and traffic source.
Some of these sites and online services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress settings to help 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 Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of important data, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your Google Search Console account has been set up, use this information to integrate and automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, you can add visitor tracking code to all of your pages in WordPress via plugins and send data instantly to various other online applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account is set up, the details can be used with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress 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 platform if you are planning 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 traffic generation system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need your social accounts set up before you can configure these as part of 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 and profiles set up with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are many social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to go crazy, just select those that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools (we will review some of these tools in more detail further below and during the Automation phase).
(There are many social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add a feed from your WordPress site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your RebelMouse social feed.
There are various solutions that can be incorporated into your own web traffic system. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with third-party sites, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
The WordPress admin area contains a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As described below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have purposely chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services box
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is listed …
(WordPress Update Services)
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 and WordPress will do 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
***
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 traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your site to get the rest of the content from summaries, 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 traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Generally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to automatically notify various update services when new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(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 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the ways SEO-friendly URLs can be configured …
(Configuring permalinks)
If you need help setting up WordPress permalinks, see this tutorial: Setting Up Your WordPress Permalinks
Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality imaginable to your website, including 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 handling 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 cannot ignore the importance of securing your website or blog.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
Go here for more info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(Yoast SEO – WP Plugin)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins.
Many social plugins allow you to choose which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your pages which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress Traffic Generation Theme Settings – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring layout and design elements of your website, some themes also provide built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in traffic optimization features)
With many themes, adding social sharing features to your website is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
Configuring Other WordPress Areas
Last but not least in the web traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can hurt your business when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you do business online (or are planning to), it’s important that your website is compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business practices online.
(Is Your Website Compliant?)
We have written a detailed article about how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your website here:
WordPress Post Tags And Post Categories
Post categories & post tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your web pages.
(Post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s SEO.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s tags and categories should be set up during the Website Planning Phases.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and categories have been correctly set up to deliver optimal results.
Add A Site Map
A visitor site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages 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 web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different 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 results in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – Don’t Forget To Configure This Too!
When visitors searching for your website enter the wrong URL into their browser or click on a dead hyperlink, they will typically be greeted with a 404 page …
(A 404 Not Found page)
A 404 Error Page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up on your server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then to generate web traffic is post content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different elements and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of skills and knowledge involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take many web developers a long time to learn.
Once you have expertly 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 here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials aimed at helping site owners learn how to grow their business and drive traffic automatically with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven online marketing strategies.
Get Notified When New Tutorials Get Published – Subscribe To WPCompendium.org!
***
"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
***