Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your website 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 is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is publish great content on a regular basis to automatically drive more web traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to get started 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 site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In this section of the series, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic system. You will learn how to configure a WordPress site so you can automatically attract new visitors just by consistently adding web content on your website.
WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Phase
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. With business becoming increasingly more competitive, it’s worth looking into any opportunity you can to improve your performance online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous advantage over the competition. With an expertly configured WordPress site, you have an immediate competitive advantage from the word “go”.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to explain the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only does a whole lot more labor go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special type of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a story.
A Semi-True Story …
All is going fine in the gizmo factory when things grind to a sudden stop.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the floor manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert walks immediately towards the control box. After staring at the board for what seems like 5 minutes, the expert then produces a teensy-weensy hammer from his shirt pocket and makes a single tap about 1 cm from the bottom-right edge of the box.
Immediately, everything springs back to life.
The plant manager is relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager receives a bill for $5,000.
With great anger, the manager picks up the phone and calls the expert. Why were they expected to pay such a ridiculously high fee for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of work? He then requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives and is placed in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving new visitors to their sites.
How much money did the gizmo plant stand to lose when the equipment stopped functioning and no one in the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to be compensated fairly for having spent years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to immediately repair a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your website fully set up and configured so all you had to do is publish new content and search engines, social media and dozens of other web properties would be instantly notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your website?)
Although the solution to many challenges often seems quite simple in hindsight, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to work things out.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than installing a website and configuring a few settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install to get specific functionalities on your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts you need to set up to achieve desired results
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure to ensure that processes will run as you have imagined, etc.
(Generating web 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 involved and complicated. This is because it’s not as easy as installing one or two plugins, configuring some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a process that involves your web hosting server, your WP site, and a number of third-party sites and/or online services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart showing the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these steps in more detail.
Your Server – Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for website installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is configuring settings in your server that affect how your website will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your webhosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your business will attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for both good and unwelcome traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like implementing spam protection and securing server files, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up 404 error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of third-party sites.
External Services
The purpose of setting up external sites is that all content is posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it gets distributed automatically to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After incorporating these external sites into your system, content linked back to your site will get automatically published on these platforms. Your website will then be exposed to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some of these third-party sites will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress site’s settings 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 WordPress site:
Google Webmasters
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with useful data, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your account is with Google have been set up, you can use this information to automate web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, marketing campaigns, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data are set up, traffic monitoring code can be added to WordPress via a plugin used with other applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account and site data have been set up, you can use this information to integrate and automate traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful 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 system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need your social accounts set up in order to 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 attract new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts and profiles set up with all the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can set up and syndicate your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select those that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we cover some of these tools in more detail during the Automation phase).
(You can syndicate your content to loads of social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free plans, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add a feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute your content to social networks)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your own RebelMouse website.
There are many different solutions that can be incorporated into your traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore some of these and 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 Your WordPress Site
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.
Global WordPress Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and often overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – 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 ping the update services entered into the Update Services box
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is listed …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically …
(You can 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
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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 readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your content 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 here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Generally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows your site to automatically ping all the update services you have listed when a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion Settings
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
Permalinks enable your site to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings Screen)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring post permalinks)
We have written a detailed tutorial about using WP permalinks here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks
WordPress Traffic Plugin Settings – Configuration
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your site, including traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is completely immune from being attacked by hackers.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
Go here to learn more:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your web pages …
(WordPress Plugin – Yoast SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index, it allows you to configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with others online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you publish content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with WordPress plugins)
There are loads of free or inexpensive social sharing plugins to choose from.
Most social plugins allow you to 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 social sharing plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
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 linking structure for better indexing, add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With many themes, adding social sharing features to your pages is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Additional Areas To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the traffic configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you do any type of business online (or are planning to), it’s important that your website is compliant with government legal requirements.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
If you need help understanding why it’s important to have a legally compliant website, see this article:
Tags And Post Categories
Post categories & tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your web pages.
(Post categories help search engines index your website, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s categories and tags during the Website Planning Stage.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the tags and categories you have set up.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A visitor site map that lists all of your posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications find 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 not the same things. 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), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Page – An Additional Source Of Traffic!
When visitors searching online for your site type in the wrong URL or click on a link pointing to a destination on your site that no longer exists, they will normally be presented with a 404 Not Found page …
(Default WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 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 allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your website fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then to automatically drive web traffic is add great content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and external web properties …
(WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration process can take many web developers a long time to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is explained in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read more, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven online marketing strategies.
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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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