Tag: Medical Business

In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health or medical web presence, we covered the following areas:

• Online Challenges For Medical Businesses
• Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Web Economy
• Basic Website Pages
• Improving The Content On Your Site

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

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

• Ways To Improve Traffic With WordPress
• Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
• WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website

For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Website With Plugins
• WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes

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

Improve Web Traffic With WordPress

Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.

Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)

There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:

• SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
• Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
• Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
• Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show in search results.
• Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
• Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
• Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.

WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation

As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.

For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:

• Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
• Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
• WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin

(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)

Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):

• BuddyPress – This plugin lets you set up and run your own social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
• bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up an online community forum on your WordPress website.
• E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
• Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
• Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.

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

Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries

In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical business.

Providing A Newsletter

Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:

• Drives targeted traffic
• Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
• Provides useful updates
• Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
• It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
• Increases interaction
• Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared with others

A proven way to entice visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with high value information and offer them additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health and fitness, access to fitness applications, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.

Adding A Contact Form

A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. A contact form also allows visitors to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.

Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:

• Reducing spam
• Automated response
• 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
• Convenience for visitors

One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7

(Contact Form 7)

This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.

Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.

Something 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 clinic they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct department.

Maps

Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.

Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:

• A map improves local SEO
• Helps visitors find you easily
• Displays location of events

(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)

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

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

Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins & Themes

WordPress Plugins

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

Booking Calendar

(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)

This plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. medical practices, specialists, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.

(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)

This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes many additional features.

For more details, go here}:

• Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin

Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress

(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)

If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.

The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily set up your event and begin accepting bookings in a few minutes

(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager System)

Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.

Go here if you would like to learn more about Event Espresso:

• Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration System

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)

Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization

Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are several you can add to your website, including:

• Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
• Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
• Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
• Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
• Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
• Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculators Pro Plugin For WordPress

Calculated Fields Form

(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)

The Calculated Fields Form plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:

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

The plugin developers also provide a premium version with extra features and functionalities.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculated Fields Form

Weight Loss Tracker

(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)

Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.

(Weight Loss Tracker WP 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}:

• Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin

Simple BMI Calculator Widget

(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.

In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use that 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 site administrator.
• BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
• Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
• And lots more

For more details, go here}:

• Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)

Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress 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 – Database Results)

Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog 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}:

• Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin

PubMed Posts

(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)

PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. An editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.

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 Plugin For WordPress)

This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple service locations, create staff listings for doctors and more.

For more details, go here}:

• MJM Clinic Plugin

Treato

(Treato)

Treato 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 experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.

For more details, go here}:

• Treato Plugin

HealthTap Concierge

(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)

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

With the plugin 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 select a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.

For more details, go here}:

• HealthTap WP Plugin

Trend MD

(Trend MD 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, cite or read interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.

For more details, go here}:

• TrendMD WordPress Plugin

WP Nutrition Facts

(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin)

WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.

(WP Nutrition Facts – Custom Post Type Label Creation)

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

For more details, go here}:

• WP Nutrition Facts Plugin

WP Ultimate Recipe

(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)

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

Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish healthy recipes on your site.

Other WordPress recipe plugins include:

• Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
• EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and 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 – You can 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 – WordPress Plugin

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)

Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.

For more details, go here}:

• Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress

Exercise Images

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)

The Exercise Images plugin lets you add a database of exercise illustrations to your website.

(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Image Database)

For more details, go here}:

• Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin

In part three, we take a look at themes for medical and health businesses.

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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to build your medical-related web presence.

Click here to keep reading:

• Your Medical Services & Health Clinic Website – WordPress Themes

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