Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using WordPress.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically start generating traffic is publish fresh content consistently!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of the automation process. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In this section, we discuss the configuration stage of the traffic system. We will show you how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that web traffic will automatically start flowing simply by regularly posting fresh content to your website.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by business owners as their greatest challenge online. With business becoming increasingly more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth looking into any advantage that can help you increase your own competitiveness online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a tremendous advantage over the competition. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website means having a significant advantage from the very beginning.
The Difference Is In The Configuration Process
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here’s one way to explain the differences:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence and a built-in 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, but also a special type of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
All was going just fine in the gizmo-making manufacturing plant when things suddenly stopped.
As no one could figure out what happened, the plant manager decided to call in an expert to fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert immediately went towards the control box. After staring at the electronic components for 3 minutes, the expert then took out a teensy-weensy hammer from his pocket and made a single tap near the left-hand corner of the box.
Immediately, everything sprang back to life.
The floor manager was filled with joy as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the factory manager received an invoice for the amount of $5,000.
The manager picked up the phone and called the expert, demanding to know why they had been charged such an exorbitant fee for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work and then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrived in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is driving visitors to their sites.
How much money did the widget plant stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one in the factory floor had the expertise required to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for having spent years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to quickly repair a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your website configured so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other web properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
Although many experts often make complicated solutions look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than installing a website and configuring basic settings. It involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install to get specific functionalities on your site.
- Which third-party services need to be set up and activated to achieve specific results
- Which settings need to be configured in order to make sure things function to plan, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This part of the traffic automation system is not technically difficult, but it’s quite involved and time-consuming. This is because it’s not just about installing and configuring one or two plugins, configuring some settings in your admin area … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration stage is a process that involves your server, your website, and various external sites or online services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If the activities involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart of all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved in more detail.
Your Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for site installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings in your web server specifically for handling web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your website can attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been fine-tuned and configured (if required), the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites or online services.
Configuring External Sites
The idea behind adding external sites is that all of your content is posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it radiates outwards automatically to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you incorporate these external sites into your configuration, content with links pointing back to your site is automatically posted to search, social and aggregator sites. Your content and website benefits from exposure online, helping you tap into new sources of traffic.
Some sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your settings to 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 Search Console
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with important information, SEO tools, and reports about their website.
Once your account has been with Google have been set up, the information can be used with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site details have been set up, your account information can be easily integrated with WordPress using a Google Analytics plugin and and fed to other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account, your account information can be used with web traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress provides users with a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your automated web traffic generation system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(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 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.
Make sure you have accounts set up with all of the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. You don’t need to go crazy, just select those that will work with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(There are many social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online web platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add an RSS feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your RebelMouse website.
There are various sites and platforms you can incorporate into your own web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore some of these further and discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up third-party site accounts, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Web Site For Traffic
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 of the important areas.
Configuring WordPress Settings
By default, your WordPress administration area includes a Settings section that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress menu – Settings)
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 area contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Screen)
As described below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have purposely chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of update services entered into the Update Services text box
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is listed …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(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 your content gets seen by readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website or 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.
The most important setting in this section as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is ticked or not.
Generally, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to automatically notify various update services whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Screen)
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 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
Your Permalink settings allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the ways SEO-friendly URLs can be configured …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
To learn more about setting up permalinks, see this step-by-step tutorial: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs
Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add just about every type of functionality to your site, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
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 website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No site is completely immune from a cyber attack.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to botnets and hackers.
For more details, go here:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your web pages …
(WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find and index, it allows you to configure 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 publish content that adds real value to readers.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins available for WordPress users.
Most social sharing plugins allow you to choose which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your site which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
WordPress Traffic Theme Features – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, many themes also give you built-in options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, easily add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons to your content is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons to configure your options and enable the function …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)
Configuring Other WordPress Areas For More Traffic Results
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for both good and unwanted traffic but also for all the situations that can hurt your business as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you do business online (or plan to), it’s important that your website is found to comply with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
We have written a detailed article about how to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website or blog here:
WordPress Post Tags & Categories
Post categories and post tags help to improve your site’s SEO, which helps you get more traffic.
(Post categories help to improve your site’s SEO, which improves traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your website’s categories and tags should be reviewed and set up during the Website Planning Stage.
When configuring your site to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s categories and tags have been set up correctly to deliver optimal results.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites find your website 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. 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 results in increased traffic.
Your Site’s 404 Page
When online users enter the wrong URL into their web browser or click on an invalid hyperlink, they are presented with an error – page not found message …
(A 404 Error Page)
A 404 page can redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found 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 plugins for WordPress that let you 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 need to do then to begin attracting more web traffic is publish great content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of various elements and web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes many web developers a long time to acquire.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This tutorial is part of an article series designed to help business owners learn how to grow their business online cost-effectively and drive traffic automatically with a WordPress-driven website and proven web marketing methods.
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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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