Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this article series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to start generating more traffic is add web content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase of the automation process. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this article, we will look at the configuration phase of the traffic automation process. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to automatically get traffic when you begin to publish fresh content on your web site.
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Configuration
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With business becoming ever more competitive worldwide, it’s worth exploring every advantage available to get better results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a tremendous advantage over other competitors. For businesses, an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start from the moment their site is launched.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress has to offer.
Here is a simple way to understand the differences:
With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does it take additional labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special type of expert knowledge.
Let me illustrate this point with a story.
A Semi-True Story …
Everything was going fine in the gizmo plant when things ground to a sudden halt.
No one could figure out what has happened and so the manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrived and, without uttering a word, headed immediately towards the control box. After staring silently at the wiring diagrams for no more than 3 minutes, the expert then produced a little hammer from his tool belt and made a gentle tap near the right-hand corner of the control unit.
Immediately, the plant returned once again to normal.
The plant manager was grateful and relieved as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the manager received a request for payment of services rendered for the sum of $5,000.
The manager rang back the expert, demanding to know why they were expected to pay so much for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrived in the manager’s intray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving web traffic to their sites.
How much money did the factory stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one on the business had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have the right to be compensated fairly for investing years developing the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and repair a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WP website set up and configured so all you had to do is publish new content and search engines, social media and dozens of other 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 attracting new visitors to your site?)
Although many experts often make difficult things look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site is more than installing a website and configuring a few basic settings. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which programs you need to install to get certain functionalities on your site.
- Which services you need to set up and activate to get desired outcomes
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured to ensure that things work how you have envisioned, etc.
(Generating traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the traffic automation system may not seem so technically difficult, it can be quite involved and time-consuming. It’s not just about installing and configuring a plugin, clicking a couple of buttons, or tweaking some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration stage involves the integration of different parts such as your server, your website or blog, and a number of external sites …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If we create a simple flowchart showing the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified flowchart of the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved in more detail.
Configuring The Web Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your webhosting account for installation purposes. We’re talking about configuring settings and options in your web-hosting account that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic your site can attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, requires evaluating your needs, planning for good and unwelcome traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like integrating server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, setting up error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirections, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of third-party sites.
3rd-Party Solutions
The basic idea of adding external sites is that all content will be published to a central location (your site) and from there, it will get syndicated automatically to other parts of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external platforms have been added to your traffic network, content with links pointing back to your site will get automatically added to search, social and aggregator sites. Your content and website will be exposed to new sources of traffic and new audiences.
Some sites and services will need to be set up before configuring your settings to 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 Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly website or blog)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell 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.
After setting up your account, your information can be used with traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
After setting up your account, you can add visitor tracking information to all of your pages in WordPress using a simple Google Analytics plugin and send data instantly to various other useful applications.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account has been set up, your account information can be used with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) 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 grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful 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 these features into your automated traffic generation system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and bring new traffic to your site)
You will need your social accounts set up before you can 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 sites and get new visitors to your site.
You should set up accounts and profile pages with all the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick those that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools.
(You can post your content to lots of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online technology platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary-level sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free accounts, 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 WordPress blog …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute social content to social networks)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your own RebelMouse website.
There are many different technologies and third-party applications that can be incorporated into your own web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore some of these and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website Or Blog
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global Settings – WordPress
The WordPress admin area contains a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains an important and often overlooked traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As described below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely chosen 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 contains only one entry …
(WordPress Update Services)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically – 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 …
(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 visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can have an influence web traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could play a part in 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 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 checkbox is ticked or not.
Typically, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows your site to instantly notify all the update services you have listed whenever new posts get 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 unchecked …
(Settings Menu – 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 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 …
(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the ways your permalink URLs can be configured …
(Configuring post permalinks)
To learn more about setting up WordPress permalinks, see this step-by-step tutorial: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Here are 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. Regardless of the type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, web security is something you cannot afford to ignore.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to hackers and botnets.
More info:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your web pages …
(SEO plugins like Yoast SEO help drive more traffic by making your site more search engine friendly)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines to index, it also lets you specify how to display your content in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with their friends and networks can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
There are many social sharing plugins available for WordPress users.
Many social sharing plugins let you specify which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring design and layout elements of your site, some themes also provide options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add analytics, 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 features to your pages is as easy as clicking a few buttons and enabling the feature …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Additional Configuration Areas For WordPress Traffic
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic system configuration process, are the things that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and unwanted traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you make money online (or are planning to), it’s important that your website complies with regulatory agencies.
(Is Your Website Compliant?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, see this article:
WordPress Tags And Categories
WordPress post categories and tags help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.
(WordPress post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your website.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and categories should be reviewed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
When configuring your site to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories you have set up.
A Site Map Of Your Posts And Pages
A site map that displays all of your site’s pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external tools discover your site’s 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. Only search engine bots can understand an XML sitemap. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Your 404 Page Not Found
When visitors 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 …
(Default WordPress 404 Error Page)
A 404 Error Page can be turned into a useful source of traffic to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up on your web server, there are plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog fully set up and expertly configured, all you then need to do to begin attracting more traffic is publish web content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of different elements and web properties …
(WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some website professionals months to acquire.
Once you have expertly 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 our series.
This is the end of Section 3
To continue reading this article, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive tutorial series designed to help site owners learn how to grow their business and drive traffic sustainably with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven online marketing strategies.
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