In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your health or medical business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Site With WP Plugins
- WP For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins & themes that can help improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and generate more visitors to your health-related site.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Website Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to run your own social networking community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(You can add social features to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides other ways for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide users with high value content and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical tools, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving 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
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and 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 segment your contact form so visitors can choose the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct department.
Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins And Themes
Health And Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. It is well supported and provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range of medical or health-related businesses, such as dental practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso Plugin 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 plugin enables you to easily schedule an event and start accepting registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical uses, but there are several you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake 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)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This simple WordPress plugin 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 other plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to 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 WordPress Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific data. It also includes a simple editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
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)
This versatile plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in 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 over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, users 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, chat using text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert exercise illustrations into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we take a look at medical WordPress themes.
***
This is the end of section 2.
Click on this link to view the rest of this article:
***
***
"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