Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is add web content on a regular basis to drive traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start 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 has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration stage of the traffic automation process. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to automatically begin driving new traffic as you begin publishing fresh content on your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Businesses are becoming ever more competitive on a global scale and are looking for any and every opportunity they can to increase their competitiveness online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand is a tremendous competitive advantage. With an expertly configured website, you have a significant advantage from the word “go”.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here is a simple way to explain the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence with a built-in 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, it also takes a special type of expertise.
To illustrate this here’s a little story.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
Everything is going just fine in the widget assembly line when things come to a sudden stop.
As no one can figure out what is wrong, the floor manager decides to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert goes directly to the main control box. After staring at the wiring diagrams for less than 2 minutes or so, the expert then produces a teeny-weeny little hammer and makes a single tap near the right corner of the control unit.
Immediately, everything comes back to life.
The manager is greatly relieved as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a request for payment of $5,000.
With great anger, the manager rings the expert. Demanding to know why the expert has charged them so much for less than 5 minutes work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the plant stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one in the business had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for years spent acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to quickly avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a blog set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and search engines, social media 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 driving traffic to your website?)
While the solution to many challenges is often ridiculously simple in hindsight, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than installing a website and configuring some basic settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install to get certain functionalities on your site.
- Which 3rd-party services need to be set up to get desired results
- Which settings you need to configure in order to make sure processes will run as you have imagined, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically difficult, it can be quite involved and complicated. It’s not as easy as installing a plugin, tweaking some options and settings in your admin area or clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of different components such as your server, your web site, and a number of third-party sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart of all the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these areas.
Your Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes. What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings in your web hosting account specifically for handling web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your website can attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like configuring server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirections, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites and online services.
External Sites & Services – Configuration
The purpose of adding external sites is that all of your content is posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it then gets distributed automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you add these external services to your setup, content linking back to your site is automatically added to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your site receives exposure online, helping you tap into new sources of traffic.
Some of the sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site 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 before configuring your WordPress site’s settings:
Google Webmasters
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Webmasters lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with important data, SEO tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account with Google Search Console, the details can be used with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site details have been set up, you can add traffic tracking information to WordPress via a simple Google Analytics plugin and feed data automatically to other online applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account has been set up, use this information with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress offers website owners a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to build a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your web traffic system in Part Four of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need your various 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 get new visitors to your site.
You should set up accounts with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can You can syndicate your content to lots of social sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick those that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools (we will cover some of these tools in greater detail further below and during the Automation phase).
(There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online technology platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute social content to social networks)
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 RebelMouse account.
There are various technologies and third-party applications you can add to your own traffic system. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Web Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
Configuring WordPress Settings
The WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can 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 powerful and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(WordPress 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 purposely chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the list of services entered into the Update Services field
By default, this section displays only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can 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 visitors will see your content 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 a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your site to read 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 traffic is concerned, however, the main setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Generally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to automatically notify all the update services you have listed whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Section)
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)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the ways SEO-friendly URLs can be configured …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
If you need help setting up permalinks, see this step-by-step tutorial: Configuring Your WordPress Permalinks
Configuring Settings – Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add almost every type 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 increase traffic
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is immune from being attacked by hackers.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and botnets.
Go here to learn more:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your web pages …
(WP Plugin – Yoast SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find, classify and index, it also lets you specify how to present your content in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with their social networks can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you post content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
You can add social features to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Most social share plugins allow you to choose which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring design and layout aspects of your website, many themes also provide built-in options for improving SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your pages is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
Configuring Other WordPress Areas For Traffic Results
Last but not least in the configuration process, are the elements that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to your business as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you do business online, it’s important that your website complies with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Site Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, see this article:
WordPress Tags And Categories
Tags and categories help search engines better classify and index your web pages, which helps you get more traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your site’s post tags and post categories earlier on, during the Website Planning Stages.
When considering ways 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 displays all of your posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites find more of your web content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. HTML site maps are web pages that provide users with a an understandable map of how your content is structured, whereas XML sitemaps contain code that only search engine bots can read. Although Google can index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which plugins 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 visitors type in the wrong URL or click on a dead hyperlink, they are presented with an error – page not found message …
(Default WordPress 404 Error Page)
A 404 page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up in your server, there are several plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your site fully set up and expertly configured, all you then need to do is publish new content regularly to begin attracting new web traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of various elements and external web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of skills and knowledge required to perform the configuration process can take many website developers a long time to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is addressed in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Part Three
To keep reading, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively and drive traffic sustainably with a WordPress-powered website and proven marketing methods that are easy and quick to implement.
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