In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical & Health Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services
- Basic Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In Parts Two & Three, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you set up your own social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
This section explains ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
A proven way to entice your visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a special report, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to medical tools, discount vouchers, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Add A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right person.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness and sports businesses, such as medical practices, physicians, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso 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 enables you to easily create an event and start accepting registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the 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 Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are several you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. 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 Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WP Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can use 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and display 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 – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search widget that locates posts with specific data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
This free plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a database of exercise illustrations to your website.
(Exercise Images – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we will look at health-related and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two.
Click here to continue:
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