Welcome to Part Three of our 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 provided an overview of 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, all you have to do to automatically start generating new web traffic is add new content regularly!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will discuss the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. We will show you how to configure a WordPress site so you can automatically bring new visitors simply by adding fresh content on your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as their greatest challenge online. With business getting so much more competitive, it’s worth learning about every advantage that can help you increase your own competitiveness online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand is a huge advantage. For businesses, having an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start as soon as their site is launched.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to describe the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a web presence plus an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence with 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 process into your website, but also a special type of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with an anecdote.
Are Experts Worth The Money They Charge?
Everything is going well in the gizmo-making workshop when things come to a sudden stop.
No one can figure out what’s gone wrong and so the floor manager decides to call in an expert.
Promptly after arriving, the expert goes immediately to the control box. After staring silently at the box for no more than 5 minutes, the expert then takes out a teeny-weeny little hammer from his tool box and makes a gentle tap near the left side of the box.
Immediately, everything springs back to life.
The manager is greatly overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the manager receives a service bill for $5,000.
Bewildered and angry, the factory manager calls the expert. Demanding to know why they were expected to pay 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 notice arrives in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive visitors to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the widget plant stand to lose when production 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 in our story not have the right to ask to be compensated fairly for years spent acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to quickly assess and repair a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a website or blog configured so all you have to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and dozens of other web properties would be instantly 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 situations and problems look easy, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few settings. It involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install to get certain functionalities on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up to get certain results
- Which settings you need to configure to make sure things will work how you have planned, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the traffic automation system is not technically difficult, but it’s quite involved. It’s not as easy as installing and configuring a piece of software, clicking a button, or tweaking some settings in your admin area … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration stage is a complex process that involves your web hosting server, your WP site, and a number of external sites …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we try to flowchart the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved in more detail.
Your Web Server – Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web hosting account for website installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings in your server that affect how your website will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic your business will attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for both bad and good 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 domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirections, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step is to set up and configure various third-party sites or online services.
External Services
The idea behind choosing external sites is that all content will be published to one central location (your site) and from there, it will syndicate automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external sites have been added to your setup, content pointing back to your site will be automatically fed to these platforms, indexed by search engines and shared to other social sites, even to visitors attracted to the platform itself. Your business will then be given exposure to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of these external sites 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:
Google Webmasters
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmasters lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with a range of essential information, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your account and site data have been set up, this information can be used with traffic-related settings in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your account, you can add traffic monitoring information to WordPress via a plugin and send data automatically to other applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account and site data are set up, you can use this information with traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part 2, WordPress offers a hosted and a self-hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you are planning to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your web traffic generation system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your various social accounts 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 get new visitors to your site.
You should set up accounts and profile pages with all the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can set up and post your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select those that will work well with your system and/or content syndication tools.
(You can syndicate your content to loads of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can act as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add a feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute social content to social networks)
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 website.
There are many different sites and platforms that can be added to your own web traffic system. Please feel free to 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 third-party sites, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
Configuring WordPress
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.
Global Settings
The WordPress admin area contains a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Screen)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As stated in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have intentionally chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the services entered into the Update Services text area
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is listed …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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 Settings
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 traffic. For example, choosing to display 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 blog to view 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 your traffic system is concerned, however, the most important setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to ping various update services when new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings)
Discussion
Although this section is 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 Section)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the options for configuring your permalinks …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
If you need help setting up WordPress permalinks, go here: Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs
Configuring WordPress Traffic Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including traffic generation.
Let’s take a brief look at 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 handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No web site is completely safe from a cyber-attack.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and bots.
Go here to learn more:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website …
(SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your website more search engine friendly)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines 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 Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins.
Most social share plugins let you select which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some social share plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which visitors can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WordPress Traffic Theme Features – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, many themes also include built-in options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for better indexing, add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes can be configured for better traffic results)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons to your website 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)
Additional Configuration Steps For WordPress
Last but not least in the WordPress traffic system configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle good and bad traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online (or are planning to), you need to ensure that your site is compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business practices online.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
For a detailed article about how to quickly add legal pages to your site, refer to this article:
Categories And Post Tags
Tags & post categories help search engines better classify and index your website, which helps to increase traffic.
(Categories help search engines classify and index your website, which helps you get more traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your website’s post tags and categories earlier on, during the Website Planning Process.
When looking at ways to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the post categories and tags you have set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites discover your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which plugins 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.
404 Page – Don’t Lose Traffic!
When visitors searching for your website type in the wrong web address into their web browser or click on links pointing to destinations on your website that no longer exist, they will typically be greeted with an error page (known as a 404 page) …
(A 404 Page)
A 404 Not Found page can redirect confused visitors to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your web server, there are plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your website or blog expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do to automatically start generating new web traffic is post new content consistently.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of different components and web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The skills and expertise required to perform this process can take many web professionals a long time to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is covered in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Part Three
To keep reading, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of an article series designed to help website owners learn how to grow their business with a WordPress-driven website and proven marketing strategies that are easy to implement.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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