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In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your health or medical-related business presence online, we covered the following areas:

• Online Challenges For Medical Practitioners
• Opportunities For Medical Services Providers
• Basic Website Pages
• Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website

In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health services online.

Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:

• Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress
• Generate Leads & Enquiries
• How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins

For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Site’s Capabilities
• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes

Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.

Improving Traffic

Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.

Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress

There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your health or medical website for search engines:

• SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
• Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
• Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
• Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will show in their search results.
• Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
• Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
• Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.

How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With Plugins

In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.

For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:

• Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
• Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
• Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)

(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)

Other things you can do to improve your health site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):

• BuddyPress – This plugin lets you run your own social network on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
• bbPress – Run a discussion forum on your WordPress site.
• E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a third party subscription.
• Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
• Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.

(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)

Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries

Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.

Adding A Newsletter

Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits including:

• Drives targeted traffic to your website
• Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
• Provides useful updates
• Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
• It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
• Increases user engagement
• Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared around with others

A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical applications, discount coupons, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.

Adding Contact Forms

Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow readers to send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.

Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:

• Reducing spam
• Set up automated responses
• Giving you control over what gets sent to you
• You can keep your email address private
• They can be added to any page or post
• Looks professional
• Convenience for visitors

One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7

(Contact Form 7)

This free plugin lets you create multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.

International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.

Another option to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the practice they are contacting your business about. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the correct destination.

Adding Maps

Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.

A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:

• A map helps to increase local SEO
• Visitors can find your office more easily
• Show location of events

(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)

Here are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:

• Google Maps
• Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
• WP Google Maps
• Comprehensive Google Map Plugin

Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins

WordPress Health & Medical Plugins

WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:

Booking Calendar

(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)

This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, such as medical practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.

(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)

Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available with many extra features and functionalities.

For more details, go here}:

• Booking Calendar Plugin

Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration System

(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso For WP)

If your business involves running medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.

The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up an event and begin accepting online bookings literally in a few minutes

(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Software)

Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.

If you want to learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, see this article:

• Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Plugin

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators)

Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization

Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related usage, but there are many you can add to your site, including:

• Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
• Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
• Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
• Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
• Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
• Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculators Pro Plugin

Calculated Fields Form

(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)

Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:

• Health & Fitness Calculators
• Ideal Weight Calculator
• Pregnancy Calculator
• Calorie Calculator
• And many more

The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin

Weight Loss Tracker

(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)

Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.

(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)

The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.

For more details, go here}:

• Weight Loss Tracker Plugin

Simple BMI Calculator

(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)

This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.

As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can use to perform similar functions:

• BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
• BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
• Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
• And many more

For more details, go here}:

• Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)

Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.

(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Database Results)

Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

For more details, go here}:

• Drug Interaction Data

PubMed Posts

(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)

This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that finds posts with specific data. An editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.

PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.

For more details, go here}:

• PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin

MJM Clinic

(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)

The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, clinic locations, feedback entries and more.

For more details, go here}:

• MJM Clinic Plugin

Treato WordPress Plugin

(Treato Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.

Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.

For more details, go here}:

• Treato

HealthTap Concierge

(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)

HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.

With the widget installed, your site visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.

For more details, go here}:

• HealthTap WordPress Plugin

Trend MD

(Trend MD Plugin)

This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.

For more details, go here}:

• TrendMD Plugin For WordPress

WP Nutrition Facts

(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)

WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices.

(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Labels)

WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.

For more details, go here}:

• WP Nutrition Facts

WP Ultimate Recipe

(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)

If you run a health-related business that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.

Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy recipes on your site.

Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:

• Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes that readers can print, save and review.
• EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
• ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
• And many more.

For more details, go here}:

• WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)

The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.

For more details, go here}:

• Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin

Exercise Images by Everkinetic

(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)

Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise diagrams into your web content.

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Database)

For more details, go here}:

• Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin

In part 3, we will look at medical and health-related WordPress themes.

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This is the end of part two of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your health-related web presence.

To view the rest of this article, click this link:

• Your Medical Services And Health-Related Website – WordPress Themes

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