In Part One of this article on ways to improve your health or medical web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Services Providers
- Opportunities For Health Providers
- Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 and 3, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Site’s Functionality
- Themes – An Introduction
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Improve Web Traffic
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to run a social network on your site.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up and manage your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can easily add social features to your website with WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll discuss how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your health-related business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health and diet, access to health tools, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let users provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms 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 WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right department.
Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some 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
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins And Themes
Health WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range of health or medical-related businesses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up multiple events and start accepting registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health applications, but there are quite a number you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to 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 use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. A basic 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)
MJM Clinic can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, your visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 Plugin For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your site.
(Exercise Images – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we will be discussing health and medical themes.
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This is the end of section two.
Click on this link to continue:
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