In Part One of this article on ways to improve your health or medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Services Professionals
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Providers
- Your Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic With WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Grow Your Health Website – Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, we explore WordPress plugins and themes for improving SEO, better user engagement and driving more visitors.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your health or medical-related website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Site
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Set up an online community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to 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.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides other ways for readers to share your content
A proven way to entice your visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and offer users additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving general health and nutrition, access to medical calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets readers report concerns, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you add multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so users can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This will help get their comment to the correct area.
Add A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
WordPress Medical & Health Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. 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 with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Software
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create multiple events and start receiving online registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related use, but there are several you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets 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 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 BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
This free plugin 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 other WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a visitor’s BMI
- 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs 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 and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple service locations, create service listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
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 patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about over 14,700 conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors 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 their question and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin will add 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides diet 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 publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we look at medical and health themes.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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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