In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health & Medical Profession
- Opportunities For The Medical And Health Profession In The Online Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Traffic
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins that can improve SEO, improve user engagement and generate more visitors to your site.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps 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.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic 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 XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up your own social networking community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add social sharing features to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
In this section we will discuss ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your health business.
Add A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing engaging with users
- Provides you with additional ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for enticing visitors to subscribe is to provide users with content of high value and give them additional items of value for free in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving diet and nutrition, access to medical tools, vouchers, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. Contact forms also allow readers to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can 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 is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to add multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the center they are contacting you about. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct area.
Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your website 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
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins For Health And Medical Services Providers
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range of businesses, such as medical practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make online bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar 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 and includes extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily set up your event and begin accepting registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health-related use, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming 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, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress 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 a number of WordPress plugins you can look at 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 trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that finds posts with specific data. A basic 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 WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content 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 over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your site 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. to your fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we take a look at health-related and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section 2 of this article on ways to improve your health business web presence.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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