In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health And Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Professionals In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Grow Your Medical Center Website – Improving Your Business Online With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins and themes for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and generating more web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your health or medical website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Site
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your 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 powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run an online social network on your website.
- bbPress – This plugin helps you set up and manage your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social features to your website with WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
This section will show you ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to get your visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical applications, vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow users to report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which section of the practice they want to reach. This helps get their message to the correct destination.
Adding A Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins
WordPress Medical And Health Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software enables you to easily create multiple events and start receiving online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are quite a few you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator 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 additional WordPress plugins you can check out that 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 shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
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 – Data Results)
Information about drugs 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 and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that finds posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included.
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)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, clinic locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects 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 can access insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors 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, 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
TrendMD adds 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized 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 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. 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click on this link to continue:
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