In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical or health web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Health And Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Providers In The Digital Economy
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Your Medical & Health Practice Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your health website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available many plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use this WordPress plugin to set up a social community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run an online community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section we will discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide them with valuable content and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow readers to report concerns, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so users can select the practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the correct area.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits or appointments
- Shows location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This free bookings plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make a booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create multiple events and start processing online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are a few you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin 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 insert 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use to 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.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A content editor is also included.
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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable 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 Plugin For WordPress)
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, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, 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 select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides diet 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 recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a database of exercise illustrations to your health & fitness-related sites.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at WordPress themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this comprehensive article on ways to build your medical web presence.
Click here to read the rest of this guide:
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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