Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a site into an automated web traffic generation machine using WordPress.
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 website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to automatically generate traffic is publish great content consistently!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we will discuss the configuration stage of the traffic automation process. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to attract traffic automatically when you post fresh content to your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Businesses are becoming increasingly more competitive and are exploring any opportunity they can to get better results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge advantage over the competition. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website means having 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 a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here is a simple way to explain the differences:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a little story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
Things were going just fine in the widget-making workshop when the machines suddenly stopped.
No one could figure out what was wrong and so the plant manager decided to call in an expert.
Promptly after arriving, the expert immediately walked towards the control box. After staring at the control unit for 5 minutes, the expert then produced a tiny little hammer and made a single tap about 1 cm from the right edge of the box.
Immediately, the machinery returned to normal.
The floor manager was overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager received a bill for $5,000.
The manager dialed the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged such a ludicrous fee for so little time delivering such minimal amount of work. He then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrived and was placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is driving visitors to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when the equipment stopped functioning and no one in the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have every right to demand fair compensation for spending years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to immediately repair a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your website set up and configured so all you have to do is publish new content 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 website?)
Although the solution to many challenges is often quite simple once implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than installing a website and configuring a few basic settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed to get certain functionalities on your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up and activate to achieve desired results
- Which options need to be configured in order to make sure things will function as planned, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This stage of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite complicated. This is because it’s not as simple as installing a piece of software, clicking on a button or two, or configuring some settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration phase is a process that involves your web hosting server, your WordPress site, and various third-party sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart of the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine what’s involved.
Your Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings and options in your server that affect how your site will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic you may attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for good and unwanted traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, setting up 404 error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and services.
External Accounts
The basic idea of setting up external sites is that all of your content should be posted to a central location (your site) and from there, syndicate automatically to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After incorporating these external services into your traffic system, content linked back to your website gets automatically published on these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social networks, even to users of the platform itself. Your content and business will be exposed to a new audience and source of traffic.
Some of these sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site to help speed up the 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 Search Console)
Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of essential data, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your account and site details with Google are set up, use your information with web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s traffic results, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site details are set up, account data can be easily integrated with WordPress using any of several Google Analytics plugins used with other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account with Bing Webmaster Tools are set up, use the account information to automate traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers both the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to grow a professional web 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 explain how to integrate these features into your traffic system in Part Four of this series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site)
You will need your various social media and social bookmarking accounts set up in order to 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 get new traffic to your site.
Set up accounts with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick those that will work with your system and/or content sharing tools (we discuss some of these tools in more detail during the Automation phase).
(There are lots of social sites you can syndicate your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add an RSS feed from your site …
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 visitors can follow your website.
There are various platforms 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 plan to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Site
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
By default, all WordPress installations include a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most powerful and often overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Screen)
As described below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically configured your settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the update services entered into the Update Services section
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is listed …
(Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(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 visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can have an influence web 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 impact someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to view the rest of the content from summaries, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The main setting here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Generally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to ping various update services whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
Discussion Settings
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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your post permalinks …
(Configuring permalinks)
To learn more about setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Let’s look at examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to bring more visitors to your site
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is completely safe from being hacked.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to bots and hackers.
For more information, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(SEO plugins help drive 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 website’s SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO 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 sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with their friends and members of their social networks can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if your site provides content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with WordPress plugins.
Many social plugins let you choose which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some plugins even allow you to protect content which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, many themes also include built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site linking structure for faster indexing, add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a free theme) have built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing features to your site is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic Automation – Additional Configuration Areas
Last but not least in the web traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you engage in any form of business online (or plan to), you need to ensure that your site is compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Comply With The Law?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, see this article:
WordPress Tags And Categories
WordPress post categories and tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your pages.
(Categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s SEO.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s post tags and post categories should be discussed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Process.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post categories and tags you have set up.
Visitor Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools discover your web content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web 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 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.
Don’t Forget Your 404 Error Page
When visitors searching for your website type in the wrong web address or click on links pointing to destinations on your site that no longer exist, they will normally be greeted with a 404 error page …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up in your web server, there are plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your website has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do to automatically drive web traffic is add fresh content consistently.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of various components and web properties …
(WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration process typically takes many website professionals a long time to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This article is part of an tutorial series designed to help you learn how to grow your business using a WordPress-driven website and proven marketing strategies that are easy to implement.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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