In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your health web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical Providers In The Online Economy
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your health services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Your Medical Services & Health Center Website – Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better 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 other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Site Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that 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:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up a social network on your site.
- bbPress – Set up a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
This section explains ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared with other potential customers
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide them with valuable information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving general health and nutrition, access to health tools, coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Readers can provide feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site 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 and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so users can select which section of the practice they are contacting your business about. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right area.
Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Health WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and 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 with a ton of extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily create your event and begin accepting registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager System)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health-related uses, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein 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 Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – 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 Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can use to 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 that displays your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display 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 – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, 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 converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts 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 article data. A basic content editor is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple clinic locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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 choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD adds 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}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
This free plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make better decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise diagrams on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at medical and health themes.
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This is the end of section 2.
To continue reading, click here:
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