In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your medical or health web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Providers
- Essential Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two and Three, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Website
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Improving Website Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve your business online with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your medical or health website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up your own social community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up an online community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
This section covers ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with new potential customers
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness tools, discount vouchers, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Readers can report problems, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages 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 site
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right destination.
Provide Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported and provides users with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness & sports-related uses, such as medical practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create an event and start accepting online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical applications, but there are quite a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate 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)
This plugin is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following 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)
This plugin 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 a number of plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
This plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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 the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. It also includes an editor that changes the layout of data in your post content.
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)
MJM Clinic was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato 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 from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, 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 using text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers 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 search engine optimized recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site 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 – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at WordPress themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to build your health or medical web presence.
To continue reading, click here:
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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