Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this article series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is add web content on a regular basis to automatically begin attracting more web traffic!)
In Part 2, we looked at critical setup decisions. We explained 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 site, and what to do if your existing site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we look at the configuration phase of the traffic system. We explain what makes an expertly configured site different. You will also discover how much work is required to ensure that when all is fully set up and configured, web traffic will automatically start flowing simply by publishing fresh content to your website.
WordPress Traffic System – Configuration
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business getting ever more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth exploring every advantage available to get better results online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand is a tremendous advantage over other competitors. For WordPress users, an expertly configured website means having a significant advantage from the very beginning.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to understand the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does a whole lot more labor go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
Allow me to illustrate this with an amusing story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All is going well in the gizmo-making factory when everything suddenly just stops.
As no one can figure out what is wrong, the manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert immediately goes towards the control box. After staring at the control unit for less than 5 minutes or so, the expert then takes out a little hammer and makes a gentle tap near the left corner of the box.
Immediately, all the machinery springs back to life.
The manager is relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives an invoice for $5,000.
Unable to contain his anger and sense of outrage, the manager rings the expert. Demanding to know why the expert has charged them such a large amount of money for less than 5 minutes work, he then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice 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 being able to drive new traffic consistently to their sites.
How much money did the factory stand to lose when the machines stopped working and no one in the business was able to fix it? Did the expert not have every 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 blog fully set up so all you ever had to do is publish new content and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other online properties would be automatically 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 site?)
While experts often make complex things look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site requires more than installing a website and configuring a few internal settings. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install to get specific functionalities on your site.
- Which third-party services need to be set up to get specific results
- Which settings you need to configure to ensure that things function as you have imagined, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this part of the traffic automation system may not seem technically challenging, it can be quite involved and complicated. It’s not just about installing and configuring a plugin, configuring some options and settings in your dashboard area or clicking a button … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of many parts such as your web server, your WP site, and various external sites and services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we create a simple diagram of the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a better look at these areas.
Your Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is tweaking settings and options in your web server that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your server 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 unwelcome traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like implementing spam protection and securing server files, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess and error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these, the next step is to set up and configure various third-party sites and/or online services.
Integration With External Sites
The idea behind adding external sites is that all of your content should be published from a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, be distributed automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
Once these external platforms have been added to your network, content linked back to your website gets automatically syndicated to search, social and aggregator sites. Your content and website will be given additional exposure to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of the web properties and online platforms 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, you will want to set up the following accounts:
Google Webmasters
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmasters 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 diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your Google Search Console account and site details have been set up, the information can be used with web 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 campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data are set up, you can add traffic tracking code to WordPress using a plugin and send data instantly to many other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And 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 data, your account information can be used to automate web traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress provides users with a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to build a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your automated traffic generation system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media Pages
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site)
You will need your various social media accounts set up in order to configure these as part of your traffic generation system.
Once you have set up and configured everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts and profiles with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can You can syndicate your content to many social sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(You can post your content to loads of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Platforms, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online technology platforms and content aggregators that can act as second-tier 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 lets you add a feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your RebelMouse page.
There are many different platforms you can incorporate into your web traffic system. Please contact us if you would like to explore some of these further and discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
Configuring Your WordPress Site For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
The WordPress administration area contains a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Section)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings section contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services text area
By default, only one service is listed …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section and WordPress will do the rest …
(You can 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 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 traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS feeds 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 read 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 main setting in this section as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Typically, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to automatically notify the update services list when a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(WordPress 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 blogs linked to from your posts, 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 allow you to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks Screen)
The examples below show some of the ways your post permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring post permalinks)
We have written a detailed tutorial on using permalinks in WordPress here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add almost every kind of functionality to your website, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help to increase traffic
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the kind 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 web sites.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to botnet and hacker attacks.
More info:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by making your web content easily indexable …
(SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines to find and index, it also gives you control over how your content is presented in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using WordPress plugins.
Most social share plugins let you choose which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your site which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings
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 layout and design elements of your website, many themes also provide built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes allow you to configure settings for improved traffic results)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your content is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Additional Features Of WordPress To Configure For Better Traffic Flow
Last (but by no means least) in the WordPress traffic system configuration process, are the components that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to your business as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you make money online, it’s important that your site is compliant with all legal requirements.
(Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
For a detailed article on why it’s important to have a legally compliant website, refer to this article:
Post Tags And Categories
WordPress post tags and categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your website.
(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your website.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your site’s post tags and categories earlier on, during the Website Planning Phases.
When considering 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 correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
A site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications discover your online content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. HTML site maps provide users with a an understandable map of how your content is organized, whereas XML sitemaps are mostly code that only search bots can understand. Although search engines like Google can index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
Your 404 Page
When visitors searching for your website type in the wrong URL or click on hyperlinks pointing to an incorrect destination on your website, they will typically be presented with an error page (known as a 404 Not Found page) …
(Default WordPress 404 Error Page)
A 404 Not Found page can be turned into a useful source of traffic to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your web server, there are plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then to automatically generate traffic is publish web content consistently.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of various components and web properties …
(WP Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of skills and expertise required to perform the configuration process can take some website developers a long time to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is explained in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Part 3
To read more, click here:
This tutorial is part of an tutorial series designed to help website owners learn how to grow their business using a WordPress-powered website and proven web marketing methods.
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