Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive traffic automatically to your website using the WordPress CMS.
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is post great content on a regular basis to drive more web traffic!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase of the automation process. We helped you understand 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 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will look at the configuration phase of the WordPress traffic automation system. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to ensure that new web traffic will automatically start flowing when you begin to add web content to your web site.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as their greatest challenge online. With competition becoming progressively tougher businesses are looking for any opportunity they can to get better results online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous competitive advantage. For business owners, having an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start from the moment their site is launched.
The Difference Is In The Configuration Process
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here is a simple way to understand the key difference:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does it take additional work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special type of expertise.
To illustrate this point here is a joke.
Knowing Where To Tap
Things are going fine in the widget assembly workshop when the machines suddenly stops.
No one can figure out what’s gone wrong and so the plant manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Soon afterward, the expert arrives and, without saying a word, walks straight towards the control box. After staring silently at the wiring diagrams for no more than 2 minutes, the expert then takes out a teeny-weeny hammer and makes a single tap near the right edge of the box.
Immediately, the whole workshop lights up and starts working again.
The floor manager is relieved as he thanks the expert, who leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a request for payment of services rendered for $5,000.
Angry to the point of feeling outrage, the manager picks up the phone and dials the expert. Demanding to know why they have been charged such an exorbitant fee for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice notice arrives in the manager’s intray. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new traffic to their sites.
How much money did the widget factory stand to lose when the equipment stopped working and no one in the factory floor was able to fix it? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for investing years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to immediately repair a costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a website set up so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social media and dozens of other traffic-generating online properties would be instantly notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your website?)
Although many 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 is more than installing a website and configuring settings for a client. It also requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up and activate to get specific results
- Which options you need to configure in order to ensure that things will function as envisioned, etc.
(Driving web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This stage of the WordPress traffic automation system is not so technically challenging, but it’s quite involved and complicated. It’s not as easy as installing and configuring a solution, tweaking some settings in your dashboard area … it’s all this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a complex process that involves your web server, your web site, and various third-party sites and services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplified flowchart of the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine these areas in more detail.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about tweaking settings in your web-hosting account specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the web traffic you will attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like configuring spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
Once your web server settings have been checked and configured, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and online services.
Configuring External Web Properties
The purpose of choosing external sites is that all content will be published from a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will get distributed automatically to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once these external platforms have been added to your configuration, content pointing back to your site is automatically added to these platforms. Your content and business will receive exposure online, helping your business tap into new sources of traffic.
Some external sites and solutions will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site’s settings to help speed up the process 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 Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmasters – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with important information, tools and reports about your website.
After setting up your account with Google, your account details can be used to integrate and automate web traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s performance, SEO, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrers, etc.
After setting up your account, visitor tracking information can be added to all of your pages in WordPress via any of several Google Analytics plugins and instantly sent to various other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. Once your account and site data with Bing Webmaster Tools have been set up, use your account information to integrate and automate traffic 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 self-hosted and a hosted option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to grow a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which a number of WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your automated web traffic system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media accounts and bring new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your social media accounts 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.
Set up accounts and profile pages with all the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work well with your system and/or content sharing tools.
(You can syndicate your content to lots of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of online platforms and content aggregators that can serve as second-tier sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, 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 displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your RebelMouse website.
There are various technologies and third-party applications you can add to your web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore some of these further and discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up external service accounts, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global Settings – WordPress
By default, your WordPress administration area includes a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains an important and often overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings)
As stated below the Update Services section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have intentionally chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the services entered into the Update Services section
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is listed …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(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 your content gets seen by readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can influence web traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to get 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 traffic is concerned, however, the main setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is ticked or not.
Typically, you 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 a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, make sure this box is left unchecked …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion Settings
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 …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalink Settings
Your Permalink settings allow your site to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks Screen)
The examples below show some of the ways permalink URLs can be configured …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
Plugin Settings
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that can add just about every type of functionality imaginable to your site, including traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that affect traffic generation
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site 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, website security is something you cannot 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 attacks from hackers and botnets.
For more details, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages more search engine friendly …
(WordPress SEO plugins help increase traffic by making your site more search engine friendly)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google to find, crawl and index, it also lets you configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help to increase traffic to your site, especially if your site provides great content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social features to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
There are many free or inexpensive social sharing plugins to choose from.
Most social sharing plugins let you select which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, many themes also give you built-in features that let you improve SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, easily add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) can be configured for improved traffic results)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your site is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic System Configuration – Additional Sections
Last but not least in the traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Legal Web Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to your business when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of commercial activity online (or plan to), it’s important that your website complies with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
We have written a detailed article on why it’s important to have a compliant website here:
WordPress Post Tags & Categories
WordPress categories and tags help search engines better organize and index your web pages, which helps you get more traffic.
(Categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your web pages.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your website’s post tags and categories should be reviewed and set up during the Website Planning Phases.
When configuring your website to automate and improve web traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s categories and tags have been set up correctly to deliver optimal benefits and results.
Add A Site Map To Your WordPress Site
A visitor site map that lists all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites discover your web content …
(Site Map – great for site 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 contains code that only search engine bots can read. Although search engines like Google will index your site just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Configure Your 404 Page
When visitors searching for your website type in the wrong web address or click on a hyperlink pointing to an incorrect destination on your site, they are greeted with a 404 page …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(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 server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Stage – Summary
Once your site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then is publish fresh content on a consistent basis to drive traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of different elements and web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of expertise required to perform the configuration stage of the traffic automation process typically takes many website 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 explained in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Part 3
To continue reading this article, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help site owners learn how to grow their business online cost-effectively using a WordPress-powered website and proven marketing strategies that are easy and quick to implement.
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