In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical And Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation using WordPress plugins & themes.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to run a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up your own online discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared online with others
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving health and fitness, access to health tools, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can send feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
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 set up and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the right department.
Map Integration
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using Plugins
Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of medical or health-related businesses, such as dental practices, physicians, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available and includes extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule your event and begin processing online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related uses, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can check out to 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 trainer (administrator).
- 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 lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple clinic locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, 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 text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy 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 – You can 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise images into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed article, we look at medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part two.
To keep reading, click here:
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