In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to build your health or medical web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical Profession
- Opportunities For The Health & Medical Profession In The Online Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Functionality To Your Website With WP Plugins
- A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Health Professionals – Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and driving more web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your health or medical-related website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your web pages
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and run an online social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – Set up your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Easily add social sharing features and buttons to your site.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a special report, tips for improving health and diet, access to fitness applications, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Users can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you create multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so users can select the section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct destination.
Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily and plan their appointments better
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of health-related businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make a booking quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up your event and start processing registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. If you would like to know more here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health-related use, but there are many you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search feature that locates posts with specific data. A simple content editor 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}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, your site visitors can type in a health question and based upon their location and type of question, they will 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 using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your health & fitness-related sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert exercise images into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we take a look at themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
To view the rest of this article, click this link:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now