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:
- Online Challenges For Medical Professionals
- Online Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners
- Essential Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your health or medical website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available many plugins that improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you run your own social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up and manage an online discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
This section explains how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to health tools, free trials, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and lets you create multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right destination.
Map Integration
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported and provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness and sports-related businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily create your event and begin receiving bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health uses, but there are quite a few you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking 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, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium plugin version with a ton of extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. An 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 WP Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, 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 over video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD 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, read or cite interesting 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 is a simple 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 better decisions about the food they consume.
(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 Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great way to add 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 recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise images on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed article, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click on this link to view the rest of this article:
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