Tag: Healthcare Business

In Part One of this article on ways to build your health-related business online, we covered the following areas:

• Online Challenges For The Health Profession
• Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Professionals
• Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
• Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site

In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.

Topics covered include:

• How To Improve Traffic
• Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
• 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:

• Add New Functionality To Your Blog With WP Plugins
• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes

Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.

Online Business Tips For Health Services Providers – Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins

Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section, we discuss how to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and generate more web traffic using plugins and themes.

Optimize Your Site For SEO Using WordPress

There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:

• SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
• Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
• Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
• Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
• Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
• Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts on your site
• Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.

Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins

In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.

Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:

• Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
• Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
• Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)

(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s search engine optimization)

Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some plugins that can help:

• BuddyPress – Run your own social network on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
• bbPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you set up a discussion forum on your website.
• E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
• Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
• Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website.

(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)

Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications

Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.

Adding A Newsletter

Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow 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 a targeted marketing channel
• Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
• Increases user interaction
• Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared with new potential clients

An effective way to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to health apps, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.

Adding A Contact Form

Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. A contact form also allows visitors to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions for new services or products and more.

A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:

• Reducing spam
• Set up automated responses
• Giving you control over what is sent to you
• You can keep your email address private
• Different forms can be added to any post or page
• Looks professional
• Convenient for site visitors

A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7

(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)

Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.

Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the center they want to reach. This helps get their comment to the right recipient.

Map Integration

Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.

Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your WordPress site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:

• A map increases local SEO
• Visitors can easily find you
• Displays location of events

(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)

Here are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:

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

Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins

WordPress Health Or Medical Plugins

WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:

Booking Calendar

(Booking Calendar)

Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. medical practices, physicians, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.

(Booking Calendar – Overview)

Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and make a booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available with additional features and functionalities.

For more details, go here}:

• Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin

Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Software

(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)

If you plan to run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.

The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule multiple events and begin accepting online registrations literally in a few minutes

(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager)

Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.

Go here for a detailed article about managing events with Event Espresso:

• Manage Bookings And Registrations Online With Event Espresso For WP

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)

Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.

Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health usage, but there are many you can use, including:

• Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
• Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
• Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
• Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety 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 For WordPress)

Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:

• Health & Fitness Calculators
• Ideal Weight Calculator
• Pregnancy Calculator
• Calorie Calculators
• And many more

A premium version of this plugin is also available with a ton of additional features.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin

Weight Loss Tracker

(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)

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

(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)

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

For more details, go here}:

• Weight Loss Tracker

Simple BMI Calculator Widget

(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin)

Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.

As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can use that perform similar functions:

• BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site administrator).
• BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s BMI
• Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
• And more

For more details, go here}:

• Simple BMI Calculator Widget

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

(Drug Interaction Data)

Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.

(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Database Results)

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 drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

For more details, go here}:

• Drug Interaction Data Plugin

PubMed Posts

(PubMed Posts Plugin)

This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included.

PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.

For more details, go here}:

• PubMed Posts Plugin

MJM Clinic

(MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin)

The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on symptoms and health conditions.

For more details, go here}:

• MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin

Treato WordPress Plugin

(Treato WordPress Plugin)

Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.

Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.

For more details, go here}:

• Treato WordPress Plugin

HealthTap Concierge

(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)

HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.

With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your site visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then choose 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}:

• HealthTap

Trend MD

(TrendMD Plugin)

TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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}:

• Trend MD – WordPress Plugin

WP Nutrition Facts

(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)

This simple plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make better decisions about the food products they consume.

(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)

This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.

For more details, go here}:

• WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin

WP Ultimate Recipe

(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)

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

A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.

Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:

• Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
• EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
• ZipList Recipes – 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 For WordPress

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)

The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your website.

For more details, go here}:

• Awesome Fitness Testimonials

Exercise Images

(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)

The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise illustrations on your website.

(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Image Catalog)

For more details, go here}:

• Exercise Images

In the next section of this guide, we discuss medical clinics and health themes.

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This is the end of part 2.

Click here to continue:

• Your Health & Medical Clinic Website – WordPress Themes

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