Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically begin bringing new web traffic is publish new content regularly!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase of the traffic automation process. We helped you understand 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 website, and what to do if your existing site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we will discuss the configuration phase of the traffic blueprint. We will show you how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that new visitors will automatically start flowing when you add content to your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – 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. With business getting ever more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth exploring any and every advantage available to improve your performance online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous advantage over the competition. An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a flying start and a significant competitive advantage online.
Configuration 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 its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to understand the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only are more steps needed to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expert knowledge.
Allow me to illustrate this with an amusing story.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
All is going fine in the widget plant when everything suddenly grounds to a halt.
No one can figure out what’s wrong and so the floor manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrives and immediately walks towards the control box. After staring at the box for what seems like 3 minutes, the expert then takes out a tiny little hammer and makes a gentle tap about 3 inches from the left-hand corner of the box.
Immediately, everything returns once again to normal.
The plant manager is delighted as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager receives a request of payment for services for the sum of $5,000.
Angrily, the factory manager rings the expert. Why were they expected to pay so much for less than five minutes work? He then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice arrives in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one in the factory floor had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have the right to demand fair compensation for spending years developing the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to immediately repair a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your blog set up so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social media and dozens of other traffic-generating online properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
While many experts often make difficult solutions look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few internal settings. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which services you need to set up to achieve specific outcomes
- Which settings need to be configured in order to ensure that things will work to plan, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite complicated. The reason why is because it’s not just about installing and configuring a solution, configuring some options and settings in your dashboard area … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many parts including your web server, your website, and a number of external sites and/or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram showing the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved.
Web Server Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes. What we are talking about, is configuring settings and options in your web server that affect how you will handle all web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your web hosting account settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic your website can attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for good and bad traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like implementing spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirections, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been fine-tuned and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of external sites.
Integration With External Solutions
The basic idea of adding external sites is that all content is posted to one central location (your site) and from there, it then gets automatically distributed to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external services have been added to your traffic network, content with links pointing back to your website is automatically published on your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your site will then be given exposure to a new audience and new sources of traffic.
Some sites will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress settings 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:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of important information, SEO tools and reports about your website.
After setting up your account with Google, use this information to automate web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data are set up, you can add traffic tracking information to all of your pages in WordPress using a simple plugin and send data automatically to various other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account and site details are set up, the details can be used with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress provides users with a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to grow a professional web presence.
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 show you how to integrate this into your automated web traffic generation system in Part Four of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your social media accounts 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 bring new traffic to your site.
You should have pages set up with all of the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can You can syndicate your content to loads of social sites. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose those that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online web platforms and content aggregators that can serve as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add an RSS feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your website.
There are many different platforms that can be incorporated into your own traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global Settings
Your WordPress admin area contains a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains an important and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As described in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services field
By default, this section includes only one entry …
(Writing Settings – Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress – just add a list of update services to this section and WordPress takes care of the rest …
(You can 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
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 web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to read the rest of the content from summaries, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as your traffic system is concerned, however, the main setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is enabled or not.
Typically, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to automatically ping various update services whenever a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Section)
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 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s permalink URLs …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
To learn more about setting up WordPress permalinks, see this step-by-step tutorial: Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs
Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that can add just about every type of functionality to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No website or blog is guaranteed immunity from a cyber attack.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to hackers and botnets.
For more details, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(WP Plugin – Yoast SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google to find 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.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
You can easily add social sharing to your website using free or inexpensive plugins.
Most social share plugins let you specify which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WordPress – Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, some themes also provide options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes allow you to configure settings for better traffic results)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your website is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic Configuration – Additional Areas To Consider
Last (but by no means least) in the configuration process, are the areas that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Compliance Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online, you need to ensure that your website stays compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
We have created a detailed article on adding legal pages to WordPress here:
Categories & Post Tags
Tags & post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search engine optimization.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your website.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to discuss and set up your site’s categories and tags during the Website Planning Phases.
When looking at ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s tags and categories have been set up correctly to deliver optimal results.
HTML Site Map
A site map that displays 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 website content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. Although Google will index your pages just using 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 Error Page – A Source Of Lost Traffic Opportunities!
When visitors searching for your site type in the wrong URL or click on a link pointing to a page on your website that no longer exists, they are greeted with a 404 error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Not Found page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error 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 admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you then need to do is post content consistently to begin bringing new traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of various components and external web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take some website developers a long time to acquire.
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 Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials aimed at helping website owners learn how to grow their business online and drive traffic organically using a WordPress-driven website and proven web marketing strategies.
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"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
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