Category: SEO Plugins

In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your medical business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:

• Online Challenges For Medical And Health Businesses
• Opportunities For Medical Services Professionals In The Online Economy
• Essential Web Pages
• Tips On How To Improve Your Content

In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.

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

• How To Improve Traffic
• How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
• WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation

For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:

• Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Site’s Features And Functionality
• WP For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.

Your Health & Medical Practice Services Website – Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins

Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section explores how to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors using WordPress plugins and themes.

Optimize Your Website For Search Engines

There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your medical website’s SEO:

• URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
• Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
• Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
• Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show in search results.
• Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
• Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
• Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.

Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins

In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available many plugins that improve your medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.

Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:

• All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
• Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
• Page-List – WordPress site map plugin

(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)

Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help:

• BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you run a social networking community on your website.
• bbPress – This plugin lets you set up and run your own discussion forum on your WordPress site.
• E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
• Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
• Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.

(You can add social sharing features to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins)

Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress

Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.

Add An Email Newsletter

Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits including:

• Drives targeted traffic
• Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
• Keeps readers updated
• Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
• Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
• Provides regular opportunities for improving interaction
• Provides an additional way for subscribers to share your content

A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to fitness tools, discount vouchers, access to courses, contests, etc.

Add A Contact Form

A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow readers to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.

A contact form provides a number of benefits including:

• Reducing spam
• Automated response
• Gives you control over what is sent to you
• Allows you to keep your email address private
• Contact forms can be added to any post or page
• Improves the professional look of your website
• Convenient for visitors

A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7

(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)

This free plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.

The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their message to the right destination.

Map

A map helps your visitors and clients find you.

Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:

• They help to increase local SEO
• Visitors can easily find you
• Display location of events

(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)

Some of the more popular map plugins include:

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

How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using Plugins & Themes

WordPress Medical Plugins

WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:

Booking Calendar

(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)

The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range of health or medical-related businesses, e.g. medical practices, surgeons, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.

(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)

The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available and includes many additional features.

For more details, go here}:

• Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress

Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Plugin

(Manage Your Events Via The Web With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)

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 multiple events and begin processing registrations in just a few minutes

(Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration Software For WordPress)

Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.

We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:

• Managing Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso For WordPress

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)

Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization

Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical-related applications, but there are quite a number you can add to your website, including the following:

• Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
• Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
• Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
• Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
• Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
• Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculators Pro – WordPress Plugin

Calculated Fields Form

(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)

This plugin is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, 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 a ton of additional features.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculated Fields Form

Weight Loss Tracker

(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)

Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.

(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)

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

For more details, go here}:

• Weight Loss Tracker

Simple BMI Calculator Widget

(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)

Simple BMI Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.

As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:

• BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index 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 that displays your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
• Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
• And many more

For more details, go here}:

• Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WP Plugin

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)

This plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.

(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Information Screen)

Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

For more details, go here}:

• Drug Interaction Data

PubMed Posts

(PubMed Posts Plugin)

PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search function that finds posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.

PubMed contains over 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)

MJM Clinic can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link  indication tags to conditions, etc.

For more details, go here}:

• MJM Clinic Plugin

Treato WordPress Plugin

(Treato WordPress Plugin)

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

Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content 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 WordPress Plugin

HealthTap

(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)

HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.

With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, 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 choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.

For more details, go here}:

• HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress

TrendMD

(Trend MD WordPress Plugin)

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

For more details, go here}:

• TrendMD Plugin

WP Nutrition Facts

(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)

This simple WordPress 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 better decisions about the food they eat.

(WP Nutrition Facts – Label Creation)

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

For more details, go here}:

• WP Nutrition Facts

WP Ultimate Recipe

(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)

If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.

A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add delicious and healthy on your site.

Other WordPress recipe plugins include:

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

For more details, go here}:

• WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)

Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your website.

For more details, go here}:

• Awesome Fitness Testimonials

Exercise Images

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)

Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise images inside your content.

(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Database)

For more details, go here}:

• Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin

In the next section of this guide, we will be discussing health and medical themes.

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This is the end of part two.

Click here to read the rest of this guide:

• How To Grow A Medical Services And Health-Related Presence Online With WordPress – Part 3

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