In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your medical web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical Services Professionals In The Web Economy
- Improve Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Web Site’s Features
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Web Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section explores ways of improving your health or medical website with WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available also a number of plugins that improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and manage a social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up and run a community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared online with others
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving general health and nutrition, access to health apps, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also lets visitors provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so users can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their message to the right department.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports-related businesses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. 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 and includes a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management System
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule an event and start accepting online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical applications, but there are many you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) 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, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects 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 gain insight about 14,700+ conditions and over 26,000 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, your 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
This plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your health & fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert exercise images into your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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