Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using WordPress.
In Part 1 of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and 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 is add great content consistently to start generating new traffic!)
In Part Two, 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 everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration stage of the traffic system. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site to begin getting web traffic automatically when you begin to add new content to your site.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive and are looking for every advantage they can to get better results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge advantage. An expertly configured website gives your business an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
The Configuration Process 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 has to offer.
Here is a simple way to explain the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only is extra labor required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special type of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with a little story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All was going well in the gizmo factory when suddenly, things stopped.
No one could figure out what happened and so the manager decided to call in an expert.
Soon afterward, the expert arrived and, without saying a word, immediately headed towards the main control box. After staring silently at the wiring diagrams for no more than 2 minutes, the expert then took out a little hammer from his pocket and made a very gentle tap about 1 cm from the bottom-right corner of the box.
Immediately, the machines began working again.
The manager was filled with joy as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the manager received a request for payment of $5,000.
The factory manager called the expert, demanding to know why he had charged them such a ridiculously high fee for less than 5 minutes work and then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice arrived on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive traffic to their sites.
How much money did the factory stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one in the business had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have the right to get paid fairly for years spent building up the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to quickly repair a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a site set up so all you have to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other traffic-generating web properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
While the solution to many challenges often seems ridiculously easy once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few internal settings. It involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts you need to set up to achieve desired outcomes
- Which options need to be configured in order to ensure that everything will work as expected, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite involved. This is because it’s not as easy as installing and configuring a solution, configuring some settings in your admin area or clicking a button … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of many different parts such as your server, your WordPress site, and a number of external sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we create a simple flowchart showing all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart of all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a better look at these areas.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for site installation purposes. We’re talking about tweaking settings and options in your web-hosting account specifically for handling web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your web-hosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic your website will attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like implementing spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After your web server settings have been fine-tuned and configured, the next step is to set up and configure various external sites and services.
External Web Properties And Solutions – Configuration
The purpose of adding external sites is that all content gets posted to one central location (your site) and from there, it gets automatically distributed to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After adding these external platforms to your system, content linking back to your site will be automatically posted to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and website will be exposed to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some of the third-party web properties and online solutions will need to have accounts set up before configuring your settings to speed up the 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 Search Console
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Search Console lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with useful information, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your account and site details with Google are set up, this information can be used with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your Once you have set up Google Analytics, you can add visitor tracking code to all of your web pages in WordPress via a plugin and send data instantly 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 Bing Webmaster Tools account and site details have been set up, the details can be used with web traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress provides users with a self-hosted (WordPress.org) and a hosted (WordPress.com) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to grow a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which a number of 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 automated web traffic system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media Pages
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your various social media and social bookmarking accounts before you can integrate these with 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 sites and drive new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have accounts and profiles set up 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 pick those that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we will look at some of these tools in more detail in the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to many social bookmarking sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online technology platforms and content aggregators that can serve as second-tier sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different user types.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news 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 you can incorporate into your own traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up external service accounts, it’s time to configure WordPress.
Configuring WordPress For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
Global Settings – WordPress
The WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and often overlooked traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Section)
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, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services text box
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section lists only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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 on this page can have an influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to get 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 in this section as far as your traffic system is concerned 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 your site to notify the list of update services when a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings)
Discussion
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 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings Screen)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the ways your permalink URLs can be configured …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
If you need help setting up WP permalinks, go here: Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks
Configuring WordPress Traffic Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that can add just about every kind of functionality to your site, including traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help drive more visitors to your site
Blog Defender Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you simply cannot afford to ignore the importance of securing your website.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to hackers and bots.
To learn more, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your web pages …
(SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your website more search engine friendly)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google to find and index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed to Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content with members of their social networks can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
There are many free or inexpensive social sharing plugins to choose from.
Many social plugins let you select which 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 shares), etc. Some plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads which users can unlock by liking your page.
WordPress Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring design and layout aspects of your website, many themes also include built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site linking structure for faster indexing, add analytics code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a free theme) allow you to configure settings and options for improved traffic results)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing features to your website is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Configuring Additional Areas Of WordPress
Last (but by no means least) in the 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 visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle good and unwelcome 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 engage in any form of commercial activity online, it’s important that your site complies with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done.
(Is Your Site Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article on how to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your website here:
Post Tags And Post Categories
WordPress post tags & post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your pages.
(Categories help search engines index your web pages, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your website’s categories and tags should be discussed and set up during the Website Planning Phases.
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.
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, it can also help external applications discover your online 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. Although Google can index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Error Page – A Source Of Lost Traffic Opportunities!
When visitors searching online for your website type in the wrong URL or click on an invalid link, they will normally be greeted with an error page …
(A 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error page can be set up on your web server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your site has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then is publish great content on a consistent basis to bring more traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of different components and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise required to perform this stage of the traffic automation process typically takes many web developers a long time to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is covered in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read more, 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 and drive traffic organically using a WordPress website or blog and proven online marketing methods.
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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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