Welcome to Part Three of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using WordPress.
In Part 1 of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to drive more web traffic is publish great content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we discussed critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will look at the configuration stage of the WordPress traffic automation system. The focus of this section is to help you understand why an expertly configured site is different from a professionally configured site, and how much work needs to be done to ensure that when all is set up and fully configured, you can bring new traffic automatically simply by publishing content on your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business becoming ever more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth exploring any and every advantage available to get better results online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous advantage over the competition. For WordPress users, an expertly configured website means having a significant advantage from the word “go”.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here’s one way to understand the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only are more steps needed to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special type of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing anecdote.
A Semi-True Story …
All is running smoothly in the widget-making workshop when all equipment suddenly stops.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the plant manager decides to call in an expert.
Shortly after arriving, the expert heads out immediately to the main control box. After staring silently at the wiring board for less than 2 minutes or so, the expert then takes out a teensy-weensy little hammer from his tool belt and makes a very gentle tap about 2 inches from the right-hand edge of the unit.
Immediately, the assembly line returns to normal.
The plant manager is delighted as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the manager receives an invoice for the amount of $5,000.
Outraged and furious, the factory manager dials the expert. Why had he charged them such an exorbitant fee for less than five minutes work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice arrives in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is driving new traffic to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the plant stand to lose when production stopped working and no one on the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to ask to be compensated fairly for investing years building up the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and repair a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your website set up and configured so all you have to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube 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?)
While many experts often make difficult things look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy when you try to figure things out.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than just installing a website and configuring a few internal settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed to get various functionalities on your site.
- Which third-party accounts you need to set up to achieve certain outcomes
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure to make sure processes will run as you have imagined, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite involved and complicated. It’s not just about installing a piece of software, clicking a button, or configuring some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and much more.
The configuration stage is a complex process that involves your web server, your WP site, and a number of third-party sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website 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 like this …
(A simplistic diagram of the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved in more detail.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your hosting account for site installation purposes. We’re talking about configuring settings and options in your hosting account that affect how you will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your website can attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for both bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like configuring server-level spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, setting up error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirections, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been checked and configured, the next step is to configure various third-party sites or online services.
3rd-Party Sites Configuration
The basic idea of choosing external sites is that all of your content will get published from one central location (your site) and from there, it will be distributed automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you incorporate these external sites into your traffic system, content with links pointing back to your website will be automatically syndicated to search, social and aggregator accounts. Your website will then receive exposure online, helping your business tap into new sources of traffic.
Some sites and services will need to be set up before configuring your site 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:
Google Webmasters
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Search Console lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with essential information, tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account, you can use the information with 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 website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, you can add traffic monitoring information to all of your web pages in WordPress using plugins and send data automatically to various other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account with Bing, the account details can be used to integrate and automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) 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 option if you plan to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your traffic generation system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and bring new traffic 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 pages and drive new traffic to your site.
You should have accounts set up with all the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick the ones that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(You can post your content to many social bookmarking sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, 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 are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute your content to social networks)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your RebelMouse account.
There are many different platforms 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.
Once you have configured your web server and set up external service accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
WordPress Configuration
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 key areas.
Global WordPress Settings
By default, all WordPress installations include a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains an important and often overlooked traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Section)
As stated in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely configured your settings to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services field
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section contains only one entry …
(Writing Settings – Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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 Settings
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 traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to view the rest of the content from summaries, 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 in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Typically, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to ping various update services whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unchecked …
(Global Settings – 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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalinks)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s permalink URLs …
(Configuring post permalinks)
We have created a detailed tutorial about using permalinks in WordPress here: Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs
Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality to your website, including traffic generation.
Let’s look at 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 the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is completely safe from being attacked by hackers.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
To learn more, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(WordPress Plugin – Yoast SEO)
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 site easier for search engines like Google to index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing your 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 buttons to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
You can easily add social sharing to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Most social sharing plugins let you 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 likes), etc. Some plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content or downloads which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, many themes also include built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes allow you to configure settings for better traffic results)
With many themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your website is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Additional Configuration Aspects For WordPress Sites
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic system 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 numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle good and unwelcome traffic but also for all the situations that can seriously affect your business as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of business online, you need to make sure that your site is compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
If you need help understanding the importance of having a compliant website, see this article:
Post Categories & Tags
Post tags and categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your pages.
(Post categories help to improve your site’s SEO, which improves traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your website’s post tags and categories should be reviewed and set up during the Website Planning Stage.
When configuring your website to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories you have set up.
Site Map
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools find 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 different things. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, whereas an XML sitemap is code that only search engines can understand. Although Google can index your site just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
Configure Your Site’s 404 Error Page
When visitors searching for your website enter the wrong URL or click on a hyperlink pointing to an incorrect destination on your website, they will typically be greeted with an error – page not found message (known as a 404 Not Found error page) …
(A 404 Not Found error page)
A 404 page can redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your server, there are several WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do is add web content regularly to automatically start driving web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and external web properties …
(WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise required to perform this stage of the traffic automation process can take some web 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 section of our series.
This is the end of Part 3
To keep reading, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive article series aimed at helping website owners learn how to grow their business and drive traffic sustainably with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven web 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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