Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this series, we described 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 is publish content on a regular basis to bring more traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this article, we will discuss the configuration phase of the traffic automation process. We will show you how a WordPress site should be configured to attract new visitors automatically when you post content on your site.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as their greatest challenge online. With competition making business survival increasingly more difficult businesses are looking for any advantage they believe will help them get better results online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous advantage over other competitors. For WordPress users, an expertly configured website means having an immediate advantage from the very start.
The Configuration Phase Is The Difference
There is a significant 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 you.
Here’s a simple way to describe the main difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence plus 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 labor go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
To illustrate this here is a story.
Knowing Where To Tap
Everything was running smoothly in the widget-making workshop when things suddenly ceased working.
As no one could figure out what went wrong, the plant manager decided to call in an expert.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrived and headed immediately towards the control box. After staring silently at the electronic components for no more than 2 minutes or so, the expert then produced a tiny hammer and made a very gentle tap about 3 cm from the left-hand edge of the control unit.
Immediately, everything inside the workshop sprang back to life.
The plant manager was grateful and relieved as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the manager received a request for payment of $5,000.
The manager dialled the expert, demanding to know why he had charged them such an exorbitant fee for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work and then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrived in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is driving visitors to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the factory floor had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for years spent acquiring the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to quickly assess and avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a WP website or blog configured so all you had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube 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 attracting new visitors to your site?)
Although experts often make complicated things look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to work things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than installing a website and configuring basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install to add specific functionalities to your site.
- Which services you need to set up and activate to achieve desired outcomes
- Which settings you need to configure in order to make sure everything functions as envisioned, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the traffic automation system may not seem technically challenging, it can be quite complicated. The reason why is because it’s not as simple as installing one or two plugins, tweaking some settings in your admin area … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of different parts such as your web hosting server, your website, and a number of external sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we were to create a simplified diagram of the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a brief look at these areas.
Web Server Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your hosting account for website installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is tweaking settings in your hosting account specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web-hosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the traffic your site may attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like integrating spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
After your server settings have been fine-tuned and configured (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of third-party sites and online services.
External Sites
The basic idea of adding external sites is that all content will get posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will radiate outwards automatically to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you add these external platforms to your system, content with links pointing back to your site will be automatically syndicated to search, social and aggregator sites. Your content and business will be given additional exposure to a new audience and source of traffic.
Some third-party sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your 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 before configuring your site:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Search Console lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of important data, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
After setting up your account with Google Webmaster Tools, your information can be used with traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site details have been set up, visitor tracking information can be added to all pages in WordPress via any of several Google Analytics plugins and and sent to many other useful applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account and site data have been set up, use this information with web traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers a self-hosted (WordPress.org) and a hosted (WordPress.com) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to build a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your traffic system in Part Four of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need to have already set up your social accounts 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 bring new traffic to your site.
You should have profiles set up with all of the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to go crazy, just select those that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools (we will look at some of these tools in more detail in the Automation phase).
(There are loads of social sites you can syndicate your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different user types.
For example, here is a content aggregator that lets you add an RSS feed from your WordPress blog …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your RebelMouse page.
There are various platforms you can incorporate into your traffic system. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
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 of the important areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
By default, your WordPress admin area includes a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains an important and often overlooked traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As stated in 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 configured your settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services section
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is listed …
(Writing Settings – 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
***
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
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 summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could affect 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 excerpts, 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 in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Typically, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to ping all the update services you have listed whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, leave this box unchecked …
(WordPress 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 blogs linked to from your articles, 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)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow your site to display posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s post permalinks …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
If you need help setting up permalinks, see this step-by-step tutorial: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring Settings – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that can add almost every kind of functionality to your site, including traffic generation.
Let’s look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No website is safe from being attacked.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to hackers and botnets.
To learn more, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web content easily indexable …
(Yoast SEO – WordPress Plugins For SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your website’s search engine optimization. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google to index, it allows you to configure 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 share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins to choose from.
Most social plugins let you choose which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads 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 grow your site’s traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring layout and design elements of your site, many themes also include built-in features that let you improve SEO and site linking structure for faster indexing, easily add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for better traffic results)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing features to your content is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure
Last but not least in the traffic configuration process, are the components that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and unwelcome traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you are making money online, it’s important that your site complies with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Comply With The Law?)
To learn more about how to quickly add legal pages to your website, go here:
WordPress Categories & Tags
WordPress categories & tags help to improve your site’s search engine optimization, which helps you get more traffic.
(Categories help search engines index your website, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your website’s post tags and categories during the Website Planning Stages.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and post categories have been correctly set up to deliver optimal results.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that displays all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites discover more of 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. Only search engine bots can understand XML sitemaps. Although search engines like Google can index your pages just using 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.
Configure Your 404 Page Not Found
When visitors searching online for your site type in the wrong URL or click on an invalid hyperlink, they are greeted with a 404 page …
(A 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up in your web server, there are several plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your website expertly configured and fully set up, all you then need to do is post fresh content on a regular basis to start driving web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of various elements and external web properties …
(WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many web professionals months to learn.
Once you have expertly 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 our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive tutorial series aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business and drive traffic organically with a WordPress website and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
Want To Get Automatically Notified When New Tutorials Are Published? Then Subscribe Using The Form Below!
***
"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
***