Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive traffic automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS.
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 or blog, all you have to do is add web content on a consistent basis to begin attracting new web traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed critical setup decisions. We explained 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 site, and what to do if your site was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In this article, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic automation process. We will show you how a WordPress site should be configured in order to automatically get traffic whenever you add new content to your website.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration Phase
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. Businesses are becoming ever more competitive worldwide and are exploring any advantage available to improve their results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous competitive advantage. With an expertly configured website, your business has a significant competitive advantage from the word “go”.
The Difference Is In The Configuration Process
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s a simple way to describe the difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a web presence with an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only are more steps required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expertise.
To illustrate this point here is a story.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
All is moving along in the widget assembly factory when everything suddenly grounds to a stop.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert heads directly towards the main control box. After staring silently at the wiring board for 3 minutes or less, the expert then produces a teeny-weeny little hammer and makes a single tap about 3 inches from the top-left side of the control unit.
Immediately, the assembly line springs back to life.
The floor manager is greatly overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager receives an invoice for the amount of $5,000.
Furious, the factory manager dials the expert. Demanding to know why they were expected to pay such a ludicrous fee for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work, he then requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive visitors consistently to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the plant stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one on the business had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to get paid fairly for spending years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly assess and fix a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress site fully configured so all you had to do is publish new content and search engines, social sites and dozens of other web 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 driving traffic to your site?)
While the solution to many challenges is often quite simple once implemented, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few basic settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install to add certain functionalities to your site.
- Which services need to be set up to achieve desired outcomes
- Which options need to be configured to make sure processes will run as you have imagined, etc.
(Driving 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. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing a solution, clicking a button, or tweaking some options and settings in your dashboard area … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration phase involves the integration of many parts such as your web hosting server, your website or blog, and a number of third-party sites …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified diagram showing the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these steps.
Configuring The Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for website installation purposes. We’re talking about tweaking settings and options in your webhosting account specifically for handling all web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your web server 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 business may attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for both 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 emails, page error redirects, etc?)
Once your server settings have been fine-tuned and configured, the next step is to set up and configure various external sites or online services.
Configuring External Web Properties
The basic idea of choosing external sites is that all content should be posted to one central location (your site) and from there, syndicate automatically to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you incorporate these external platforms into your setup, content linking back to your site will get automatically published on your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and business will receive exposure online, helping your business tap into new sources of traffic.
Some of the external sites and solutions will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site’s settings to help save time 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 before configuring your settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmasters lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of important data, tools, and reports about their website.
Once your account with Google Webmasters are set up, you can use your account information with web traffic-related settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrals, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account, you can add traffic monitoring code to WordPress using any of several Google Analytics plugins and feed data instantly to many other online applications and web properties.
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 details with Bing Webmaster Tools have been set up, you can use the details with web traffic settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers website owners 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 web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your traffic system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and bring new visitors to your site)
You will need your social media accounts set up in order to 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 and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have profiles set up with all the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select those that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress blog 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 users can follow your page.
There are many different platforms that can be incorporated into your traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore this area further and discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global Settings
The WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and often overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As described below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have specifically 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 text box
By default, only one service is listed …
(Writing Settings – Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of all the update services you want to notify as soon as you publish a new post to this section and WordPress takes care of the rest …
(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 visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can influence web traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website to view the rest of the content from a partial feed, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as traffic is concerned, however, the main setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Generally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables your site to automatically notify the update services list when a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
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 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Permalinks enable your site to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks)
Here are some of the options for configuring your post permalinks …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
We have created a detailed tutorial on using permalinks in WordPress here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring WordPress Traffic Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Let’s look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with the effects of 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, securing your website or blog is something you cannot ignore.
(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 malicious attacks from hackers and botnets.
More information:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website …
(WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines to find, crawl and index, it also gives you control over how your content is presented in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with others can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can easily add social sharing to your website using WordPress plugins.
Most social plugins allow you to specify which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, some themes also give you built-in options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WP themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) allow you to configure settings for improved traffic results)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons to your website is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features)
Other Areas To Configure For Better Traffic Results
Last but not least in the traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Compliance Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can hurt your business when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you do business online, it’s important that your website remains compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article on how to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your site here:
WordPress Post Tags And Post Categories
Categories & post tags help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better classify and index your web pages.
(WordPress categories help search engines classify and index your web pages, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and post categories should be reviewed and set up during the Website Planning Stages.
When looking at ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the categories and tags you have set up.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites find more of your online content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. Only search engine bots can read XML sitemaps. 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.
Configure Your Site’s 404 Page Not Found
When online visitors enter the wrong web address or click on a hyperlink pointing to a destination on your website that no longer exists, they will typically be presented with a 404 error page …
(A 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your server, there are several WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your website or blog has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you then have to do to generate traffic is post great content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of different components and web properties …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of expertise required to perform the configuration stage of the traffic automation process 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 process. This step is covered in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Part Three
To keep reading about this topic, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping site owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively with a WordPress-driven website and proven marketing methods that are easy to implement.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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