Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive traffic automatically to your website using WordPress.
In Part 1 of this series, we described the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically begin bringing new traffic is post fresh content regularly!)
In Part Two, we looked at critical setup decisions. 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 site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we will look at the configuration phase of the traffic automation process. We explain how to configure a WordPress site so you can automatically start to get web traffic as you begin posting fresh content on your website.
WordPress Traffic System – Configuration Phase
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With competition becoming increasingly more difficult businesses are researching any advantage they believe will help them improve their results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge competitive advantage. With an expertly configured website, you have a flying start and a significant advantage online.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a significant 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 take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here is a simple way to explain the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a web presence plus an automated online business marketing system!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence with an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special kind of expertise.
Let me illustrate this with a story.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All is moving along in the widget-making workshop when production suddenly stops.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the manager decides to call in an expert.
Soon afterwards, the expert arrives and, without uttering a word, heads immediately towards the control box. After staring at the circuit board for about 5 minutes, the expert then produces a little hammer from his shirt pocket and makes a gentle tap near the right edge of the unit.
Immediately, everything starts working as before.
The floor manager is overjoyed as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager receives an invoice for the amount of $5,000.
Angry and bordering on a sense of outrage, the manager picks up the phone and calls the expert. Why did he charge them so much for less than 5 minutes work? He promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrives and is placed in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is driving new visitors to their sites.
How much money did the plant stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one on the factory floor was able to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have every right to demand fair compensation for investing years developing the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to assess and fix a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your site set up and configured so all you had to do is publish new content and search engines, social networking sites and dozens of other web properties would be automatically 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?)
While many experts often make complicated solutions look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than installing a website and configuring a few internal settings. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which plugins you need to install for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which accounts need to be set up to achieve desired outcomes
- Which options need to be configured to ensure that things will function as envisioned, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the traffic automation system may not seem technically difficult, it can be quite involved and complicated. This is because it’s not as easy as installing a plugin, clicking a button, or tweaking some options and settings in your admin area … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration phase is a process that involves your web hosting server, your WP site, and a number of external sites …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart all the steps involved in the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart of the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved in more detail.
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 configuring settings and options in your web-hosting account specifically for handling web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web 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 business may attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both good and unwanted traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include things like server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess file redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step is to configure a number of third-party sites and services.
External Sites
The purpose of adding external sites is that all content will get posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will be automatically distributed to other components of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After adding these external sites to your traffic system, content linked back to your site gets automatically syndicated to search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and site will be exposed to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some sites and online services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site’s settings to help 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 Webmaster Tools)
Google Search Console lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with essential data, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your Google Webmasters account has been set up, your details can be used with web traffic settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s performance, SEO, marketing activities, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
After setting up your up your account and entered your site details, visitor tracking data can be easily integrated with WordPress using any of several Google Analytics plugins and and fed to other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your Bing Webmaster Tools account, this information can be used with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers users a self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to build a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great 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 this into your web traffic system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and get new traffic to your site)
You will need your social media and social bookmarking accounts set up before you can configure these as part of 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 social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have set up profiles with all the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to go crazy, just select the ones that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(You can post your content to many social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Distribute social content to social networks)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your website.
There are various platforms that can be added to your traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a strategy 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 settings.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
Configuring Global WordPress Settings
Your WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains a powerful and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Screen)
As stated in the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have intentionally configured your settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services text box
By default, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(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 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, your choice to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to view the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is ticked or not.
Normally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked allows WordPress to automatically notify various update services whenever a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Global 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 sites 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)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings)
The examples below show some of the ways site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about setting up WordPress permalinks, go here: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks
Configuring WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add almost every kind of functionality to your website, including many plugins that improve traffic generation.
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 WordPress site for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No website is immune from cyberattacks.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from causing your website harm)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to hackers and botnets.
For more details, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(WordPress Plugin – Yoast SEO)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google to find, crawl and index, it also lets you specify how to display your content in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds value to readers.
(You can easily add social features to your site using WordPress plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins to choose from.
Many social plugins allow you to select which 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 likes), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WordPress Theme Features
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, many themes also provide built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site linking structure for faster indexing, easily add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes like Graphene (a free theme) allow you to configure settings for improved traffic results)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your site is as easy as clicking a few buttons to configure your settings and enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
Other Areas To Configure For Improved Traffic
Last (but by no means least) in the WordPress traffic blueprint configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you do business online, you need to ensure that your website is found to comply with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done.
(Is Your Website Legally Compliant?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, see this article:
Tags & Post Categories
Categories and tags help search engines better classify and index your website, which helps you get more traffic.
(Post categories help to improve your site’s SEO, which improves traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s tags and categories should be reviewed and set up during the Website Planning Stages.
In the configuration phase, 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 displays all of your pages and posts 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!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, whereas an XML sitemap is mostly just a bunch of code that only search bots can understand. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Page – An Additional Source Of Traffic!
When visitors searching for your website enter the wrong URL or click on links pointing to an incorrect destination on your site, they are greeted with a 404 Not Found page …
(Default WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found 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 admin.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your site expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do is add great content consistently to automatically attract more web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of various elements and external web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of knowledge and expertise required to perform the configuration process can take many web developers a long time to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is explained in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read more, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive article series designed to help small business owners learn how to grow their business online cost-effectively and drive traffic organically using a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven online marketing methods.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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