Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress 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 provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to automatically generate more web traffic is add web content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we looked at 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 a WordPress website on your domain)
In this section of the series, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic automation process. You will understand why an expertly configured WordPress site is different. You will also understand just what kind of work is required to make sure that when all is fully set up and configured, you can automatically start getting visitors as you start to post fresh content to your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic System – Configuration
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by website owners as their greatest challenge online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive and are exploring any and every advantage they can to get better results online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous advantage. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website means having an immediate advantage from the very beginning.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to understand the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence plus online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does it take more labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this here is a joke.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
All is moving along in the widget-making plant when things grind to a sudden stop.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the plant manager decides to call in an expert to fix the problem.
The expert arrives shortly after being summoned and heads out directly to the main control box. After staring at the board for no more than 5 minutes, the expert then takes out a tiny hammer and makes a gentle tap about two and half cm from the top-left edge of the unit.
Immediately, every machine in the plant returns to normal.
The floor manager is delighted as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager receives an invoice for the amount of $5,000.
With a sense of outrage, the factory manager calls the expert. Why had they had been charged such a ludicrous fee for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of work? He then requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives and is placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is driving visitors to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the factory floor had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have the right to get paid fairly for spending years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly avert a very serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your web site configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other traffic-generating online properties would be instantly 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 website?)
Although the solution to many problems is often quite easy in hindsight, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than adding some pages with content 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 services you need to set up and activate to achieve specific results
- Which settings need to be configured in order to make sure everything will work to plan, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not so technically challenging, but it’s quite complicated. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing one or two plugins, tweaking some settings in your admin area or clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many different components including your web server, your site, and a number of external sites and services …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram showing all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at these steps in more detail.
Configuring Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for website installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about tweaking settings in your webhosting account specifically for handling 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 positive traffic. Some of the traffic your site will attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include things like spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After your server settings have been checked and configured (if required), the next step is to set up and configure a number of external sites and services.
Integration With External Solutions
The idea behind adding external sites is that all of your content will be posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it will be automatically distributed to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After incorporating these external sites into your setup, content linking back to your site is automatically posted to these platforms. Your website will benefit from additional exposure online, helping you tap into a new audience and traffic source.
Some third-party sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site’s settings to help 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 Search Console
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with essential information, SEO tools and reports about your website.
Once your Google Webmasters account and site data are set up, this information can be used with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. 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, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, you can add your account information to WordPress via plugins and send data automatically to many other useful applications and reporting tools.
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 has been set up, this information can be used with traffic settings and notifications 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 are planning to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful tools, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your web traffic generation system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your various social 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 and social bookmarking accounts and get new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have pages set up with all the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can post your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick those that will work with your system and/or content sharing tools (we will look at some of these tools in more detail in the Automation phase).
(There are many social sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add a feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your account.
There are many different solutions you can incorporate into your own web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up third-party service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
By default, your WordPress admin area includes a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most powerful and frequently overlooked traffic notification systems available to WordPress site owners …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Section)
As stated below the Update Services section title,
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, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services text area
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section includes only one entry …
(Writing Settings – Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(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 influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your content 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.
As far as your traffic system is concerned, however, the most important setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to notify various update services whenever a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings)
Discussion Settings
Although discussion settings 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 content, 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 Screen)
Permalinks
Permalinks enable WordPress to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks)
Here are some of the options for configuring your SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring post permalinks)
If you need help setting up permalinks in WordPress, refer to this step-by-step tutorial: How To Change Your WordPress Permalinks
Plugins
WordPress provides users with 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 examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to attract more visitors to your site
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
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 cannot afford to ignore the importance of securing your sites.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and bots.
Go here to learn more:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive traffic by improving your website’s ability to rank better in search engines)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines to find, crawl and index, it allows you to specify 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 share your content with others online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
There are many free or inexpensive social sharing plugins to choose from.
Most social plugins allow you to select which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your pages which users can unlock by liking your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings For Traffic Generation
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring layout and design aspects of your site, some themes also give you built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your pages is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons to configure your options and enable the function …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features)
Configuring Other Features Of WordPress
Last but not least in the traffic configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and bad traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online (or are planning to), it’s important that your website remains compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, see this article:
Categories And Tags
Post tags and post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s SEO.
(Post categories help search engines index your web pages, which improves traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s tags and categories should be discussed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Process.
When considering ways to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories that have been set up.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
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 sites discover more of your online content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. Although search engines like Google will index your site 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 Page – Don’t Forget To Configure It!
When visitors searching online for your site type in the wrong web address or click on hyperlinks pointing to destinations on your site that no longer exist, they are greeted with an error – page not found message (known as a 404 error page) …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
A 404 Not Found error page can redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error page can be set up in your web server, there are several plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site expertly configured and fully set up, all you then need to do is publish content on a regular basis to automatically begin bringing more traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different elements and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The skills and knowledge required to perform this process typically takes some web developers months to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is addressed in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven web marketing methods.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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