Welcome to Part 3 of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is add web content consistently to automatically drive web traffic!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase. 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 using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section, we look at the configuration stage of this process. We explain how to configure a WordPress site to ensure that new traffic will automatically start flowing as you begin adding new content to your website.
WordPress Traffic System – Configuration
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. With business becoming ever more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth exploring every advantage available to increase your own competitiveness online.
Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand can be a huge advantage over the competition. For businesses, having an expertly configured website means having a significant advantage from the word “go”.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here’s one way to understand the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence plus an automated online business marketing process!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing tool!)
Not only is additional work required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this point here’s an anecdote.
Ludicrous Or Fair? You Decide …
All was moving along in the widget manufacturing plant when suddenly, things stopped.
No one could figure out what happened and so the floor manager decided to call in an expert.
The expert arrived within in less than an hour and headed immediately towards the main control box. After staring at the wiring board for 3 minutes or so, the expert then took out a tiny hammer and made a very gentle tap near the bottom-left edge of the unit.
Immediately, every machine sprang to life.
The floor manager was relieved as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager received a bill for $5,000.
The manager picked up the phone and dialled the expert, demanding to know why they were expected to pay such a large amount of money for so little time delivering such a minimal amount of work. He promptly requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrived and was placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening the envelope, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive web traffic to their sites.
How much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production stopped working 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 every right to demand fair compensation for having spent years acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to immediately avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a website set up so all you had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social followers from sites like Facebook and Twitter and dozens of other web properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your website?)
While many experts often make complicated solutions look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few basic settings. It requires knowing where to tap! This includes knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install to add certain functionalities to your site.
- Which services you need to set up to achieve specific outcomes
- Which settings need to be configured in order to ensure that things function as planned, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite involved and complicated. This is because it’s not just about installing and configuring a piece of software, clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all of this and so much more.
The configuration phase is a process that involves your server, your website, and various external sites …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring a few WordPress settings)
If the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the configuration process)
Let’s take a brief look at what’s involved.
Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for site installation purposes. We’re talking about tweaking settings and options in your server specifically for handling web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web-hosting account 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 will attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for both good and unwelcome traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include looking at things like server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up 404 error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page errors, etc?)
After fine-tuning your server settings and configuring these, the next step is to configure a number of third-party sites or online solutions.
External Services
The purpose of adding external sites is that all content gets posted to one central location (your site) and from there, it gets automatically distributed to other components of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After incorporating these external sites into your network, content pointing back to your site will get automatically syndicated to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your site will then receive exposure online, helping you tap into a new audience and source of traffic.
Some external sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your site’s 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’s settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides you with useful data, SEO tools and reports about your website.
After setting up your account with Google Search Console, the details can be used to automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s traffic results, SEO, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user engagement, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and organic referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data have been set up, you can add traffic monitoring information to all of your pages in WordPress via a plugin and send data automatically to various other applications and web properties.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account and site details are set up, this information can be used to integrate and automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress provides users with a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your automated web traffic generation system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and get new traffic to your site)
You will need your social media accounts set up 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 bring new traffic to your site.
You should set up accounts and profiles with all the well-known social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are many social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to go crazy, just pick the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content syndication tools (we cover some of these tools in more detail when we discuss the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to lots of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of emerging web platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary-level traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your page.
There are many different platforms you can incorporate into your own web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
After you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure your WordPress site.
WordPress – Configuring Your Site For Traffic
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.
WordPress – Global Settings
By default, your WordPress administration area includes a Settings menu that allows you to configure your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and frequently overlooked built-in traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(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 specifically chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of services entered into the Update Services field
By default, this section includes only one entry …
(Writing Settings – WordPress Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress – just add a list containing all of the update services you want notified to this section and WordPress will do the rest …
(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 visitors 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 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 site further, and whether or not they will visit your site 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.
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.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to instantly ping various update services when new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion
Although the settings in this section 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 …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the ways site’s permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring permalinks)
To learn more about setting up permalinks in WordPress, refer to this step-by-step tutorial: How To Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks
WP Traffic Generation Plugins
WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that can add almost every kind of functionality imaginable to your site, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website 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, you simply cannot afford to ignore the importance of securing your site.
(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:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(SEO plugins help increase traffic by improving the search engine friendliness of your website)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find, crawl and index, it allows you to configure how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds real value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with WordPress plugins.
Many social plugins let you specify which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to protect content or downloads which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WordPress Theme Settings – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your website, many themes also give you built-in features that let you improve SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, add analytics, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With many themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your pages 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)
Additional Areas To Configure
Last but not least in the web traffic configuration process, are the components that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and bad traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when 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 website stays compliant with all regulations.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
To learn more about the importance of having a compliant website, see this article:
WordPress Categories & Tags
Post categories and tags help search engines index your website, which helps you get more traffic.
(Post categories help search engines classify and index your website, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to set up your website’s categories and tags 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 that have been set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A visitor site map that displays all of your site’s pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites discover your online content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. Although Google can index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO will create for you – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Page – Don’t Forget This!
When visitors enter the wrong URL or click on hyperlinks pointing to an incorrect destination on your website, they will normally be greeted with an error – page not found message (known as a 404 error page) …
(Default 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 redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your server, there are plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once your website has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do is publish new content consistently to start generating more web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of different components and web properties …
(WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The kind of expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take some web developers a long time to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is explained in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read the rest of this article, click here:
This article is part of an tutorial series aimed at helping small business owners learn how to grow their business using a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven online marketing methods.
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