Tag: WordPress Themes Healthcare

In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health or medical business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:

• Challenges Professional Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
• Opportunities For Medical Professionals
• Improving Your Website Pages
• Tips For Improving Your Content

In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.

Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:

• Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
• Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
• WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic

For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:

• Adding New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins
• WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes

Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.

Your Medical Practice Website – WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Site

Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve your website using WordPress plugins and themes.

Optimize Your Website For SEO

There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your medical website’s SEO:

• SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
• Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
• Post Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
• Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that search engines will display in their search result pages.
• Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
• Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster page indexing
• Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.

WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation

As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available many plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.

Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:

• All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
• Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
• WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)

(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)

Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):

• BuddyPress – Use this free WordPress plugin to set up and manage an online social networking community on your site.
• bbPress – bbPress lets you set up and manage a forum on your site.
• E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
• Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
• Monarch – Use this plugin to add social sharing features and buttons to your website.

(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using WordPress plugins)

Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress

Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.

Provide An Email Newsletter

Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits including:

• Drives targeted traffic to your site
• Keeps readers from forgetting about you
• Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
• Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
• Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
• Increases interaction
• Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared around with others

A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide users with valuable information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health calculators, free trials, membership access to courses, contests, etc.

Adding Contact Forms

A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. A contact form also allows visitors to report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.

Contact forms provide a number of benefits, like:

• Reducing spam
• Automated response
• Giving you control over what is sent to you
• You can keep your email address private
• Different forms can be added to any page or post
• Improves the professional look of your website
• Convenience for site visitors

A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7

(Contact Form 7)

This free plugin lets you insert and manage 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 also supported.

Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so users can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their message to the right destination.

Map Integration

Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.

A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:

• A map helps to improve local SEO
• Allows customers to better plan their visits and appointments
• Shows location of events

(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)

Here are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:

• Google Maps
• Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
• WP Google Maps
• Comprehensive Google Map Plugin

How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes

WordPress Plugins

WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:

Booking Calendar

(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)

Booking Calendar lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, such as medical practitioners, physicians, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.

(Booking Calendar – Overview)

This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make online bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features.

For more details, go here}:

• Booking Calendar

Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager

(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso For WP)

If you plan to run medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.

The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create your event and begin receiving registrations literally in a few minutes

(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Software)

Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.

We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:

• Managing Bookings And Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)

Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization

Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health usage, but there are many you can add to your site, including:

• Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
• Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
• Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
• Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
• Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
• Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculators Pro

Calculated Fields Form

(Calculated Fields Form)

Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:

• Health & Fitness Calculators
• Ideal Weight Calculator
• Pregnancy Calculator
• Calorie Calculators
• And lots more

A premium version of this plugin with many more features is also available.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculated Fields Form

Weight Loss Tracker

(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)

Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.

(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)

The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.

For more details, go here}:

• Weight Loss Tracker Plugin

Simple BMI Calculator

(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)

This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.

In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:

• BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate 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 a visitor’s Body Mass Index
• Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
• And more

For more details, go here}:

• Simple BMI Calculator Plugin

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)

Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.

(Drug Interaction Data – Information Screen)

Drug information can be displayed on your site. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

For more details, go here}:

• Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin

PubMed Posts

(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)

PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets users search posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of your post content data.

PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.

For more details, go here}:

• PubMed Posts

MJM Clinic

(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)

The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link  indication tags to conditions, etc.

For more details, go here}:

• MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress

Treato

(Treato WP Plugin)

This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.

Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about 14,000+ conditions and 26,500+ medications from over 2 billion collected posts.

For more details, go here}:

• Treato Plugin

HealthTap

(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)

HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.

With the widget installed, your visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the HealthTap service.

For more details, go here}:

• HealthTap Plugin

TrendMD

(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)

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, cite or read interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.

For more details, go here}:

• Trend MD Plugin For WordPress

WP Nutrition Facts

(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)

This simple WordPress plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed food choices.

(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)

This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.

For more details, go here}:

• WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin

WP Ultimate Recipe

(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)

If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides diet or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.

A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add recipes on your site.

Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:

• Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
• EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
• ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
• And many more.

For more details, go here}:

• WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)

The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your fitness websites.

For more details, go here}:

• Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin

Exercise Images

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)

The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise images in your web content.

(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)

For more details, go here}:

• Exercise Images by Everkinetic

In part three, we look at medical and health themes.

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This is the end of part 2.

Click here to continue:

• Tips For Medical Practitioners – WordPress Themes

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