In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health or medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical & Health Firms Face Online
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Web Economy
- Essential Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Features And Functionality
- Themes – An Overview
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
How To Improve Traffic
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your health or medical-related website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your web pages
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Site Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that will improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to run a social network on your website.
- bbPress – Set up an online discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add social sharing features and buttons on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll show you ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with 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 subscribers to share your content
A proven way to entice your visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Readers can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and allows you to add multiple contact forms on your site, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another feature to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct area.
Adding Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range medical, fitness & sports-related uses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Plugin
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up an event and start receiving registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
This free plugin is great 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 is also available in a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker 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}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator 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 additional plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that lets site visitors find posts with specific data. A basic content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
This plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information about health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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 choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better decisions about the food products they consume.
(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 Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add healthy 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 beautiful recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display exercise diagrams on your health and fitness website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss health-related and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section 2 of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical-related business presence online.
Click on this link to read Part Three:
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