In Part One of this article on ways to improve your health web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Services
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health business online.
Topics covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Functionality
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Medical Practitioners – WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation using WordPress plugins & themes.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your health website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a social network on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section we’ll show you how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with high value content and offer them an additional item of value for free in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to medical applications, free trials, access to courses, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also allow users to report concerns, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience 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 is easy to install and configure and allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right recipient.
Add A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Display 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 Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins & Themes
Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. This plugin provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the 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. The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create multiple events and start processing online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical-related applications, but there are several you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient 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 Plugin)
This plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 WP Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that 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 other plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress 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 – Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that finds posts with specific article data. It also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, create staff member pages for doctors and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato 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 forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about over 14,000 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, 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 using text or video, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. 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 lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts 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)
If you run a health-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy and delicious 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 – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials 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 site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed article, we take a look at medical and health WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click on this link to continue:
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