Tag: Automated Traffic WordPress

Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using WordPress.

In Part 1 of this article series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …

(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to generate web traffic is publish fresh content regularly!)

In Part 2, we discussed critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site was built using WordPress.

(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)

In this article, we look at the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. You will learn how a WordPress site should be configured in order to ensure that traffic will automatically start flowing simply by posting new content to your WordPress site.

WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration

Finding ways to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as their greatest challenge online. Businesses are becoming so much more competitive on a global scale and are looking for any and every advantage they can to improve their results online.

Being able to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide you with a tremendous competitive advantage. Having an expertly configured website gives you an immediate competitive advantage from the very start.

The Configuration Stage Is The Difference

There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by an expert website developer but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.

Here is a simple way to describe the difference:

With a WordPress site that has been expertly configured you get a web presence and online business marketing automation!

(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing system!)

Not only are more steps needed to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.

Let’s illustrate this with a story.

Knowing Where To Tap

All is going well in the gizmo manufacturing plant when all machinery suddenly comes to a complete stop.

No one can figure out what’s happened and so the manager decides to call in an expert.

The expert arrives shortly afterward and, without saying a word, goes directly to the main control box. After staring at the wiring diagrams for about 5 minutes, the expert then produces a tiny little hammer and makes a gentle tap about two cm from the left-hand side of the unit.

Immediately, everything in the workshop begins to work once more.

The plant manager is delighted as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.

A couple of days later, the manager receives a request of payment for services totalling $5,000.

Confused and outraged, the manager calls the expert. Demanding to know why they were charged such an exorbitant fee for less than five minutes work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.

The next day, an invoice statement arrives on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:

The main challenge most businesses face online is driving new traffic to their sites.

How much money did the gizmo factory stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one in the factory floor had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have every right to demand fair compensation for years spent building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and avert a crisis?

Similarly, if you could have your blog fully set up so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other traffic-generating 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 attracting new visitors to your site?)

While many experts often make difficult situations and problems look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy.

Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few internal settings. It involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:

• Which programs need to be installed for certain things to occur on your site.
• Which 3rd-party services need to be set up to achieve certain outcomes
• Which settings need to be configured in order to ensure that everything will work as you have imagined, etc.

(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)

This part of the traffic automation system is not technically challenging, but it’s quite involved. The reason why is because it’s not just about installing a solution, clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all this and so much more.

The configuration phase involves the integration of many components including your web server, your website, and a number of external sites …

(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)

If all the steps involved in the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …

(A simplified flowchart showing all the steps involved in the configuration process)

Let’s examine these steps.

Web Server Configuration

We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for website installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). We’re talking about configuring settings in your webhosting account specifically for handling all web traffic …

(During the configuration stage, your hosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)

Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your business can attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.

This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for good and bad traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like configuring server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email redirections, etc …

(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)

Once your web server settings have been fine-tuned and configured (if required), the next step is to set up and configure various external sites.

External Services

The purpose of adding external sites is that all content gets posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it gets syndicated automatically to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.

After adding these external platforms to your traffic network, content linking back to your site gets automatically posted to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and business will be given added exposure to new audiences and new sources of traffic.

Some of these sites will need to be set up before configuring your site 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:

Google Webmasters

(Google Webmasters)

Google Search Console lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with useful data, tools and diagnostic reports about your website.

After setting up your Google Webmaster Tools account, this information can be used with traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.

Google Analytics

(Google Analytics)

Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.

Once your Google Analytics account and site details have been set up, account data can be integrated with WordPress using a simple plugin and and fed to other useful applications and reporting tools.

Bing Data And Tools

(Bing Data And Tools)

Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account, your account information can be used to integrate and automate web traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.

WordPress.com

(WordPress.com)

As explained in Part Two, WordPress offers 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 web presence.

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 these features into your traffic generation system in Part Four of this series.

Social Media

(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and drive new visitors to your site)

You will need to set up your social media and social bookmarking accounts in order to integrate these with 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 visitors to your site.

You should set up accounts and profile pages with all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.

There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content syndication tools.

(You can post your content to loads of social sites. Image: ShareThis.com)

Additional Sites, RSS Aggregators, Etc.

There are many new online technology platforms and RSS aggregators that can serve as secondary-level sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans.

For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress blog feed …

RebelMouse

(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)

RebelMouse is an aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your website.

There are many different sites and platforms you can incorporate into your own traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.

After you have configured your server settings and set up third-party service accounts, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.

WordPress Configuration

The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been correctly set up.

Let’s go over some of the important points.

Configuring WordPress Settings

The WordPress administration area contains a Settings section that allows you to configure your site’s main settings …

(WordPress settings menu)

General Settings

Fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …

(Settings Menu – General Settings Screen)

Writing Settings

The Writing Settings area contains an important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification system …

(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Section)

As described in the Update Services section,

When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …

Unless you have specifically configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services box

By default, this section lists only one entry …

(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)

WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …

(You can 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 visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.

The syndication settings on this page 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 readers and blog post digests, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to get the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.

As far as traffic is concerned, however, the most important setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.

Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to instantly ping the list of update services whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, leave this box unchecked …

(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Section)

Discussion

Although discussion settings are mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs 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 …

(Global Settings – Discussion Settings)

Permalink Settings

Your Permalink settings allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …

(WordPress Settings – Permalinks Screen)

Here are some of the ways permalinks can be configured …

(Configuring post permalinks)

We have created a detailed tutorial about using WordPress permalinks here: How To Set Up WordPress Permalinks

Plugin Settings

WordPress provides users with thousands of plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.

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 handling both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, securing your web sites is something you cannot ignore.

(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)

Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to malicious attacks from hackers and botnets.

More info:

• Make Your Website Invisible To Bots & Hackers With Blog Defender Security Plugin

WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO

SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your site more search engine friendly …

(WP Plugins For SEO – Yoast SEO)

Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization. Once properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find, crawl and index, it also gives you control over how your content is presented in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.

WordPress Social Plugins

Allowing visitors to easily share your content with their friends and members of their social networks can help drive significant traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds value to readers.

(You can add social features to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)

There are many social sharing plugins to choose from.

Many social share plugins allow you to choose which social sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your pages which visitors can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.

Configuring WordPress Theme Settings

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, some themes also include built-in options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for better indexing, add analytics snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …

(Many WP themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) include built-in traffic optimization features)

With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your content is as easy as clicking a button …

(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)

WordPress Traffic Automation System – Other Aspects To Consider

Last but not least in the web traffic configuration process, are the things that need to be set up outside of the global settings.

This includes:

Website Legal Pages

Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for how to deal with good and unwanted traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people find and begin to visit your website.

If you do business online, you need to make sure that your website complies with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done.

(Is Your Website Or Blog Compliant?)

If you need help understanding the importance of having a legally compliant website, refer to this article:

• The Importance Of Having A Legally Compliant Website

WordPress Categories & Tags

WordPress tags and post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to classify and index your website.

(Post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better index your pages.)

As we recommend in this article, your site’s post tags and post categories should be discussed and set up during the Website Planning Phase.

When considering ways 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.

Add A Site Map

A site map that displays all of your site’s posts and pages to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external tools discover your site’s content …

(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for traffic too!)

Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. Although search engines like Google will index your pages just using 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 Not Found – Another Source Of Web Traffic!

When online users type in the wrong URL or click on hyperlinks pointing to pages on your site that no longer exist, they will typically be presented with an error page …

(A 404 Error Page)

A 404 Error Page can be turned into a useful source of traffic to your functional web pages …

(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 plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin.

WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Phase – Summary

Once you have your site fully set up and expertly configured, all you then need to do is publish web content regularly to start generating more traffic organically.

The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of various components and external web properties …

(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)

The kind of skills and expertise required to perform this process can take many web developers months to learn.

Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as you can. This step is explained in the next article in our series.

This is the end of Part Three

To read the rest of this article, click here:

• Web Traffic Blueprint Part Four – How To Automatically Generate More Web Traffic For Your Business

This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of articles designed to help website owners learn how to grow their business online and drive traffic automatically with a WordPress-driven website or blog and proven web marketing methods.

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