In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to build your health-related web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Practitioners
- Opportunities For Medical Practitioners In The Online Economy
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Website Generation With Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Medical Professionals – How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins and themes for improving SEO, increasing user engagement and web traffic generation.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Site Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up a social community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up a discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with WordPress plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide users with information of high value and give them free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to health tools, vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Contact forms also let visitors report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right destination.
Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, such as dental practices, physicians, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site 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 version of this plugin is also available and includes extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create multiple events and begin processing online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical uses, but there are several you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many 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)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 WP Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI 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 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature 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, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users can type in a health question and based upon their location and type of question, they will receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD lets you 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 interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
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 business that provides nutritional or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add delicious and healthy 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 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. 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 Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your health & fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise illustrations to your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we will look at medical and health themes.
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This is the end of part two.
Click on this link to access the rest of this article:
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