In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your medical web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health Profession In The Digital Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In Parts Two and Three, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and generate more visitors to your medical or health-related site with WordPress plugins.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and run your own online social network on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Run a discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(You can easily add social features to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user engagement
- Provides you with an additional way for subscribers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with high value content and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to fitness applications, discount vouchers, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Visitors can report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the center they want to reach. This will help get their message to the correct department.
Provide Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. It is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of businesses, such as medical practices, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with a ton of extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create an event and begin processing 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 Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health-related applications, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium plugin version with many additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that 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 a number of other 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 trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that finds posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, clinic locations, create staff member pages for practitioners and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato WordPress 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 read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about 14,700+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, your site 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD adds 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, 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 is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better food choices.
(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)
If you run a health-related business that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search optimized recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise drawings to your fitness-related websites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this guide, we will look at themes for medical and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click on this link to continue:
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