Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically start generating new web traffic is post fresh content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we discussed critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we will look at the configuration stage of this process. We will show you how a WordPress site should be configured in order to get traffic automatically just by publishing new content consistently on your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With competition making business survival progressively tougher businesses are researching every opportunity they can to increase their competitiveness online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand is a huge competitive advantage. With an expertly configured WordPress site, your business has an immediate advantage from the word “go”.
Configuration 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’s a simple way to explain the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special type of expertise.
To illustrate this here is a little story.
Knowing Where To Tap
All was moving along in the widget plant when everything ground to a sudden halt.
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 to the main control box. After staring at the wiring diagrams for what seemed like about 2 minutes, the expert then took out a teeny-weeny hammer from his pocket and made a very gentle tap near the right corner of the unit.
Immediately, everything started working as before.
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 factory manager received a service bill for $5,000.
The factory manager picked up the phone and dialed the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged such a ludicrous fee for so little time delivering such minimal amount of work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrived and was placed 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 new traffic to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one in the business had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for years spent building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to quickly avert a very serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WordPress website or blog set up so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social networks and dozens of other traffic-generating online 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?)
Although many experts often make difficult things look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring basic settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which plugins you need to install to get desired functionalities on your site.
- Which services need to be set up and activated to achieve specific results
- Which options need to be configured in order to make sure things function as expected, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not technically difficult, but it’s quite involved and complicated. The reason why is because it’s not just about installing and configuring a plugin, clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a process that involves your server, your site, and various third-party sites or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart of the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at these areas in more detail.
Your Web Server – Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for installation purposes. What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings and options in your web server specifically for handling web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, 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 website may attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for good and unwelcome traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like integrating spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
After your web server settings have been checked and configured (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and online services.
Integration With External Services
The idea behind adding external sites is that all content is published from a central location (your site) and from there, it gets automatically distributed to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external platforms have been added to your network, content pointing back to your website gets automatically syndicated to these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social media accounts, even to users of the platform itself. Your content and business will be given added exposure to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some of these sites will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress 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 – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of useful data, tools, and reports about their website.
Once your account and site data with Google have been set up, use this information 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 website’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
After setting up your Google Analytics account, you can add your account information to all of your web pages in WordPress via plugins and send data automatically to other applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your account and site details with Bing have been set up, you can use the information to automate web traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) 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 option if you are planning to build a professional online presence for your business.
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 explain how to integrate this into your traffic generation system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and attract new traffic to your site)
You will need your social media and social bookmarking accounts set up in order to integrate these with 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.
You should set up accounts and profiles with all of the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social sites you can You can post your content to loads of social sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose the ones that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online web platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add a feed from your website …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your social feed.
There are many different technologies and third-party applications that can be incorporated into your own web traffic system. 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 server settings and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure your WordPress settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Section)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains an important and often overlooked traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Screen)
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 chosen to prevent 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, when WordPress is installed, only one service is listed …
(Update Services)
WordPress lets you 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 visitors 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 text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website 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 traffic is concerned, however, the most important setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is ticked or not.
Normally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to automatically notify all the update services you have listed whenever a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(WordPress 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 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 Section)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings enable your site to display posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings Section)
Here are some of the ways your SEO-friendly URLs can be configured …
(Configuring post permalinks)
We have written a detailed tutorial about using permalinks in WordPress here: Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs
WordPress – Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Let’s look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you cannot ignore the importance of securing your websites.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to attacks from hackers and bots.
Go here to learn more:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving improving the way search engines find, classify and index your web pages …
(WordPress Plugin – Yoast SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines to index, it also lets you specify how to present your content to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content with others can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with free or inexpensive plugins.
Most social share plugins allow you to choose which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your pages which visitors can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WordPress Traffic Generation Theme Features – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, many themes also include built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes allow you to configure settings for better traffic results)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your pages is as easy as clicking a few buttons to configure your options and enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)
Configuring Additional Features Of WordPress For Increased Traffic Flow
Last but not least in the configuration process, are the areas that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can damage your business when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you make money online, it’s important that your website is found to comply with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done.
(Is Your Site Compliant?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, see this article:
WordPress Post Tags & Categories
WordPress categories & tags help search engines better organize and index your web pages, which improves traffic.
(WordPress post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your pages.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and categories should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Phase.
When looking at ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post categories and tags have been set up correctly to deliver optimal benefits and results.
Visitor Site Map
A visitor site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools find more of your website content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. Although Google will 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.
Your WordPress 404 Page
When visitors searching for your site enter the wrong URL or click on a dead link, they are greeted with a 404 Not Found page …
(A 404 Error Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your server, there are several WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your website has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do to start generating more traffic is add new content on a regular basis.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different components and external web properties …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many website professionals months to learn.
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 WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive article series aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively and drive traffic sustainably using a WordPress website or blog and proven online marketing strategies.
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