Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new visitors automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to automatically start generating traffic is add fresh content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase of the blueprint. 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 using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we will discuss the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. We will show you how to configure a WordPress site to automatically start getting new traffic just by regularly posting content to your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration Phase
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. With competition making business survival progressively tougher businesses are exploring any advantage they can that can help you improve their results and performance online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge advantage. An expertly configured website gives you a flying start as soon as your site is launched.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here’s one way to describe the key difference:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does it take more work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a story.
Knowing Where To Tap
Things are going fine in the widget assembly line when everything grinds to a sudden halt.
As no one can figure out what went wrong, the floor manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert immediately heads to the control box. After staring at the circuit board for less than 3 minutes or so, the expert then produces a tiny hammer and makes a very gentle tap near the left edge of the control unit.
Immediately, everything starts working once again.
The manager is relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager receives a request for payment of $5,000.
Angry and bordering on a sense of outrage, the factory manager calls the expert. Demanding to know why they have been charged such a ludicrous fee for less than 5 minutes work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrives on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is driving traffic to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when the equipment stopped working and no one on the factory floor had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have every right to ask to be compensated fairly for years spent acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to immediately avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress website configured so all you have to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other traffic-generating 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 problems is often quite easy in hindsight, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to work things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few settings. It involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install to add desired functionalities to your site.
- Which services you need to set up and activate to get desired results
- Which settings need to be configured to make sure things function as planned, etc.
(Driving traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This part of the traffic automation system is not technically difficult, but it’s quite involved. This is because it’s not just about installing and configuring one or two plugins, tweaking some options and settings in your dashboard area or clicking on a button or two … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of different parts such as your web server, your WordPress site, and a number of third-party sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we create a simplified flowchart of the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified diagram of all the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved in more detail.
Configuring The Web Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your hosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about tweaking settings in your web server that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic your site may attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like configuring spam protection and securing server files, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirections, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been checked and configured (if required), the next step is to configure a number of external sites and/or online services.
External Accounts
The concept behind adding external sites is that all of your content will be published from a central location (your site) and from there, it will be automatically distributed to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external platforms have been added to your configuration, content pointing back to your site is automatically added to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your site will receive additional exposure online, helping you tap into new sources of traffic.
Some third-party sites and solutions will need to have accounts 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, you will want to set up the following accounts before configuring your WordPress settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmaster Tools)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with useful data, SEO tools and reports about your website.
Once your account is set up, the account information can be used to integrate and automate 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 site’s performance, SEO, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrals, etc.
After setting up your account and site details, you can add traffic monitoring code to WordPress using plugins and feed data instantly to various other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your account and site data have been set up, this information can be used to automate web traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers a self-hosted (WordPress.org) and a hosted (WordPress.com) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you are planning to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your traffic generation system in Part Four of this series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and attract new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social accounts set up in order to 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 drive new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts with all the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose the ones that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools (we will look at some of these tools in greater detail further below and during the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to loads of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary 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 site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news 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 various solutions that can be incorporated into your own traffic system. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up third-party site accounts, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global Settings – WordPress
By default, your WordPress administration area includes a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Screen)
As described in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally chosen to prevent 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 available …
(Writing Settings – Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list containing all of the update services you want notified 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
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, your choice to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your site 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.
The main setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Typically, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to automatically ping the update services list when new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion Settings
Although the settings in this section 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 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)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow you to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the ways your SEO-friendly URLs can be configured …
(Configuring post permalinks)
We have written a detailed tutorial about using permalinks in WordPress here: Setting Up WordPress Permalinks
WordPress Traffic Plugins – Configuration
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help drive more traffic
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is guaranteed immunity from a cyber-attack.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to hackers and bots.
More info:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages more search engine friendly …
(WordPress SEO plugins help increase traffic by making your site more search engine friendly)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to find, classify and index, it also lets you specify how to present your content to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using free or inexpensive plugins.
Many social sharing plugins let you choose which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring WordPress Traffic Generation Theme Features
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 the layout and design of your website, many themes also give you built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing features to your content is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons to enable the function …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you do business online, it’s important that your website complies with all legal requirements.
(Is Your Site Compliant?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, go here:
WordPress Post Tags And Post Categories
WordPress post categories and tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better classify and index your pages.
(Categories help search engines index your website, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your website’s tags and categories during the Website Planning Process.
When considering ways to automate and improve web traffic, 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 benefits and results.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
A site map that lists all of your posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications find more of your web content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. Only search engines can understand XML sitemaps. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Page – Another Source Of Web Traffic!
When visitors searching online for your website type in the wrong web address into their web browser or click on hyperlinks pointing to pages on your site that no longer exist, they are greeted with a 404 error page …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
A 404 page can be configured to funnel visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect 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 allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do is add great content regularly to automatically begin bringing new traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different components and external web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise required to perform this process typically takes some website professionals months 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 our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read more, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping small business owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively with a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven marketing methods that are easy and quick to implement.
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"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)
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