In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health-related business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical-Related Businesses In The Digital Realm
- Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality
- Themes – An Introduction
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your health or medical website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social network on your site.
- bbPress – Run a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social sharing features and buttons on your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared around with others
A proven strategy for getting visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical applications, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to insert multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so users can choose the section of the clinic they want to reach. This will help get their comment to the correct recipient.
Provide Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar 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 uses, e.g. medical practices, physicians, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin allows you to easily create your event and begin accepting online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for health-related usage, but there are many you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form 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 Calculator
- And many 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 For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker 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 BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI 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 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to their 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 creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that locates posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information about health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in 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 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, your visitors 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send questions and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds 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, 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 WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food they eat.
(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 – WP Plugin)
If you own a health-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site 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 – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- 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 photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise diagrams on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we look at medical themes.
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This is the end of part two of this comprehensive article on ways to improve your health-related web presence.
To continue, click this link:
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