In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your health or medical web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Businesses
- Opportunities For Health Services Practitioners
- Basic Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Your Health Website – How To Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Plugins and Themes
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a social networking community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to run your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
In this section we show you ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your health or medical-related business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides additional ways for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness tools, free trials, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. A contact form also allows readers to raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin lets you add multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct destination.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, such as medical practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make an online booking quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily create your event and start processing registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health uses, but there are a few you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine 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)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version with a ton of extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your website 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 use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) 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 displays a visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays 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 Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific data. An editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about 14,500+ conditions and over 26,000 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress site, 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 choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress 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 and make informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – 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 Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at themes for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
Click here to continue:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum