In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your medical-related web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical And Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners
- Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Features
- A Basic Guide To Understanding WP Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Health And Medical Services Providers – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your health website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic 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
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up your own social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Set up a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides additional ways for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value information and give users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving general health and diet, access to health calculators, discount vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. Readers can send feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and allows you to create multiple contact forms on your website, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another feature to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so users can choose the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right area.
Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
Health & Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range of health or medical-related uses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create your event and start accepting registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Learn more about this here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User 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 BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on 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 check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And 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 for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 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 Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific data. A basic content editor is also included.
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 was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read 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 plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health-related website that provides 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 healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise diagrams into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we discuss themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this article on ways to improve your health or medical-related business presence online.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group