In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health or medical-related web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two & Three, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Health Services Providers – How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins & Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we discuss how to improve your business online using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical or health website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available a number of plugins that improve your health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run an online community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Easily 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 using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
In this section we discuss how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide users with high value information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving general health and diet, access to medical tools, free trials, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Readers can send feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right recipient.
Provide Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Plugin
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily schedule your event and start receiving bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more about this go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical uses, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, FENa Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming 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 Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index 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 displays your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
This plugin can be used to display 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 Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that finds posts with specific article data. It also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of data in your post content.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great way to add 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 recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – 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, 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness and 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your content.
(Exercise Images – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we take a look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two.
To continue, click here:
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