In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your medical or health web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health And Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For The Medical & Health Profession In The Web Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Website Generation Using Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins that can help to improve SEO, improve user engagement and drive more traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your health-related website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your content
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to run your own social network on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress helps you run your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
In this section we show you ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding 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 readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared with others
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to medical tools, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. A contact form also allows users to send feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the right destination.
Add A Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Medical & Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range of uses, e.g. dental practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create your event and start receiving online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Go here for an in-depth article about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for health-related use, but there are a few you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The plugin developers also offer a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – 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}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)
This free plugin 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 to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your 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 retrieves and displays information about drugs, 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 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 drug names are converted 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that locates posts with specific data. A simple 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, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple clinic locations, create service/therapy listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical 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 over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, users 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, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin will 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, read or cite interesting 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 free plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating Labels)
This plugin 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 business that provides nutritional or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- 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. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise illustrations inside your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this guide, we take a look at medical and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two.
Click on this link to view the rest of this article:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)