Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this 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 site, all you have to do is add web content regularly to drive traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of the automation process. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we will look at the configuration phase of the traffic system. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that visitors will automatically start flowing as you begin publishing new content on a consistent basis to your site.
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as the greatest challenge they face online. With business getting increasingly more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth looking into every opportunity you can to improve your results and performance online.
Having the ability to automatically generate traffic on demand is a tremendous advantage over the competition. For WordPress users, having an expertly configured website means having an immediate advantage from the word “go”.
The Difference Is In The Configuration Stage
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s one way to describe the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only are more steps required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special kind of expert knowledge.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
Knowing Where To Tap
All was going just fine in the widget-making assembly line when suddenly, things came to a stop.
As no one could figure out what happened, the floor manager decided to call in an expert.
Soon afterward, the expert arrived and, without saying a word, walked immediately towards the main control box. After staring at the wires and circuitry for less than 5 minutes or so, the expert then produced a tiny hammer from his pocket and made a very gentle tap about one inch from the left corner of the box.
Immediately, everything returned once again to normal.
The floor manager was overjoyed 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 $5,000.
The manager called the expert, demanding to know why they were being charged so much 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 #1 challenge most businesses face online is driving visitors to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the plant stand to lose when the equipment ground to a halt and no one in the business had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to get paid fairly for spending years developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to quickly fix a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your WordPress web site set up so all you had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social networking sites 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 driving traffic to your website?)
While the solution to many problems often seems ridiculously simple in hindsight, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site involves more than simply installing a website and configuring a few settings. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things like:
- Which plugins need to be installed to get certain functionalities on your site.
- Which 3rd-party services you need to set up and activate to achieve certain results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured to make sure everything will work to plan, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not so technically difficult, but it’s quite involved. This is because it’s not just about installing one or two plugins, configuring some settings in your dashboard area … it’s all of this and much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many components including your web server, your website or blog, and various third-party sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a brief look at what’s involved.
Configuring Your Web Server
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your hosting account for site installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is tweaking settings in your web hosting account that affect how you will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration stage, your web server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the web traffic your site may attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for both good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include things like integrating server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirections, etc?)
After fine-tuning your server settings and configuring these, the next step is to configure a number of external sites.
External Sites
The idea behind adding external sites is that all content will be published to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will get automatically distributed to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you incorporate these external sites into your traffic network, content with links pointing back to your website gets automatically published on these platforms. Your business will then receive exposure online, helping your business tap into new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of the third-party sites and online solutions will need to have accounts set up before configuring your settings 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 before configuring your WordPress site:
Google Webmasters
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of essential information, tools and reports about your website.
After setting up your account, this information can be used to automate web traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s traffic performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrers, etc.
After setting up your up your account and site details has been entered, you can add traffic tracking code to all of your pages in WordPress using any of several Google Analytics plugins and feed data automatically to other online applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account and site details are set up, your account information can be used with web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers users a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you are planning to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, 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 traffic generation system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media Pages
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need to set up your social media 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 drive new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have accounts set up with all of the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose those that will work with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(There are loads of social sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online platforms and content aggregators that can act as second-tier 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 an RSS feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your website.
There are many different solutions that can be incorporated into your own web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up external service accounts, it’s time to configure WordPress.
Configuring WordPress
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains an important and often overlooked traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Screen)
As described below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally configured your settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the update services entered into the Update Services field
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section displays only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list containing all of the update services you want notified to this section and WordPress will do 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 visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to read the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The main setting in this section as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility checkbox is ticked or not.
Generally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to notify your list of update services whenever new posts are published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Screen)
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 content, 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 search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring post permalinks)
To learn more about setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using SEO-Friendly URLs
Configuring WordPress Plugin Settings For Traffic Generation
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help drive more traffic to your site
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. No website is immune from being attacked by hackers.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to bots and hackers.
For more details, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your site’s SEO …
(WordPress SEO plugins 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 site’s search engine optimization. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to find, crawl and index, it allows you to specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with members of their online communities can help boost traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Most social plugins allow you to choose which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which visitors can unlock by liking your page.
Configuring WordPress Theme Settings For Traffic Generation
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, some themes also include options for improving search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons to your content is as easy as clicking a few buttons and enabling the function …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features)
Other Configuration Aspects For WordPress
Last but not least in the traffic configuration process, are the areas that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and bad traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to your business when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you are making money online (or are planning to), you need to make sure that your site remains compliant with government regulations.
(Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
We have written a detailed article about adding legal pages to WordPress here:
WordPress Categories & Tags
Post categories & tags help search engines better organize and 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, your website’s post tags and categories should be discussed and set up during the Website Planning Process.
When configuring your website to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that the categories and tags you have set up.
A Site Map Of Your Pages and Posts
A site map that lists all of your posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools find more of your site’s content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, while an XML sitemap is mostly just a bunch of code that only search engine bots can interpret. Although search engines like Google can index your pages just from 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.
Don’t Forget Your Site’s 404 Page Not Found
When online users type in the wrong URL or click on an invalid hyperlink, they will normally be presented with an error – page not found message (known as a 404 Not Found error page) …
(A 404 Page)
A 404 Error Page can be configured to funnel traffic to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your web server, there are several plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then to automatically begin attracting web traffic is post great content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise required to perform this process can take some web professionals 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 section of our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read more, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help business owners learn how to grow their business using a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven online marketing methods.
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