Welcome to Part Three of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive visitors automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this article series, we described 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 website or blog, all you have to do is post web content on a regular basis to bring web traffic!)
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 everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic automation process. You will learn how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that new traffic will automatically start flowing when you add fresh content to your web site.
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by many website owners as one of their greatest challenges online. Also, the business landscape is becoming so much more competitive and businesses are exploring any and every advantage they can that can help you improve their results online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge competitive advantage. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website means having an immediate advantage from the word “go”.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to understand the differences:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only is more work required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special type of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with an amusing anecdote.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
Things were going well in the widget assembly plant when everything ground to a sudden halt.
As no one could figure out what went wrong, the floor manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert headed out directly to the control box. After staring silently at the board for no more than 3 minutes or so, the expert then produced a teensy-weensy hammer from his shirt pocket and made a single tap near the right edge of the unit.
Immediately, all the machinery came back to life.
The floor manager was delighted as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the manager received a request for payment of $5,000.
The factory manager called 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 and promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrived and was placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving new traffic to their sites.
How much money did the widget factory stand to lose when the machines ground to a halt and no one in the factory floor was able to fix it? Did the expert not have every right to ask to be compensated fairly for investing years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to quickly avert a very serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WP website set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other online properties would be instantly notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
Although experts often make difficult situations and problems look easy, 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 some basic settings. It involves knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed to add certain functionalities to your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up and activate to achieve desired results
- Which options you need to configure in order to ensure that processes will run to plan, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this part of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically difficult, it can be quite involved and complicated. This is because it’s not as easy as installing and configuring a plugin, clicking a button, or tweaking some options and settings in your dashboard area … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration stage is a process that involves your web hosting server, your website or blog, and various external sites …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If the activities involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart of the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved in more detail.
Your Server – Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about configuring settings in your web server that affect how your site will handle all web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic your website may attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for good and unwelcome traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like configuring spam protection and security threat prevention, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess and error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
Once your server settings have been checked and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of external sites.
External Sites
The concept behind adding external sites is that all of your content will get posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it will radiate outwards automatically to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you incorporate these external platforms into your configuration, content with links pointing back to your website gets automatically fed to these platforms. Your content and website will be given added exposure to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some sites and online services will need to be set up before configuring your site to speed up the 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 site’s settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmasters lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with useful data, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your account and entering site details, you can use this information to integrate and automate 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 efforts, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, traffic tracking information can be easily integrated with WordPress using plugins used with other applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account and entering site details with Bing Webmaster Tools, you can use your information to integrate and automate traffic settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress provides users with the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to grow a professional online presence for your business.
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 show you how to integrate these features into your automated traffic system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need to have already set up your various social media and social bookmarking accounts 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 accounts and attract new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts set up with all of the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(There are loads of social sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging technology platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add an RSS feed from your WordPress site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute your content to social networks)
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 social feed.
There are many different technologies and third-party applications that can be added to your own web traffic system. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress Configuration
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.
Configuring WordPress Settings
Your WordPress admin area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to WordPress users …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As described in this 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 ping the update services entered into the Update Services section
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section displays only one entry …
(Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress – 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 …
(WordPress lets you 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 readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can have an influence web traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content appears in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could impact 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 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 enabled or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to automatically ping your update services list whenever new posts are 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 …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion
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 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)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your search-friendly URLS …
(Configuring permalinks)
To learn more about setting up WordPress permalinks, refer to this tutorial: How To Set Up Your WordPress Permalinks
Configuring WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality to your website, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your website 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, securing your website is something you cannot afford to ignore.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to hackers and botnets.
More information:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(WordPress Plugins For SEO – Yoast SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. Once properly configured, this plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to find, crawl and index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with others online can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
You can add social features to your website easily using WordPress plugins.
Most social sharing plugins allow you to specify which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Configuring WordPress Traffic Features In Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, some themes also include options for improving SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) have built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing features to your pages is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes come with built-in social sharing features)
Configuring Additional Areas Of WordPress
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 the following:
Compliance Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you make money online, you need to ensure that your website remains compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Compliant?)
For a detailed article about how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your site, see this article:
WordPress Post Categories And Tags
WordPress tags and categories help search engines index your website, which improves traffic.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your pages.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your site’s post categories and tags during the Website Planning Phases.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the tags and categories you have set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools discover more of your web 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. Although Google will index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
Don’t Forget Your 404 Page Not Found
When visitors searching for your website enter the wrong URL or click on links pointing to an incorrect destination on your site, they are presented with a 404 page …
(A WordPress 404 Error Page)
A 404 Not Found page can be configured into a useful source of traffic to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up in your server, there are several plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do is add fresh content consistently to begin attracting traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different components and web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration process can take many web developers months to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as you can. This step is addressed in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive tutorial series aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online and drive traffic organically with a WordPress-driven website and proven web marketing strategies.
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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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