In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health or medical-related web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Health Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health Services Providers
- Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Traffic With WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Website’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
How To Improve Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses ways of improving SEO, increase user engagement and increase traffic generation with plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available various plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to run a social community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up and manage a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user interaction
- Provides another way for your content to be shared with other potential customers
An effective way to attract subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to medical calculators, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow visitors to report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms to your website, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another option 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 section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right area.
Map Integration
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Clients can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more 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
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. It is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness & sports-related uses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgeons, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the 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 supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily create an event and begin accepting registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical uses, but there are quite a number you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in 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 input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
This simple plugin lets you add a widget to 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 plugins you can look at to 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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 drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that finds posts with specific data. It also includes a simple editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
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)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, clinic locations, create service listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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 using video or text chat, or send questions and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that 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 in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
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-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display exercise drawings on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your health-related web presence.
To continue reading, click here:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now