In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your health or medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Practitioners
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Functionality To Your WP Web Site With Plugins
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section explores how to improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation using plugins.
Optimize Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your medical website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will show.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to run an online community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides you with an additional way for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health tools, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Visitors can send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to insert 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 also supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the center they want to reach. This will help get their comment to the right recipient.
Map Integration
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
Health WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health site to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. It is well supported and provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness and sports-related uses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily set up multiple events and start accepting online bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related applications, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium plugin version is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator WP Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and 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 shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their 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 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 and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that finds posts with specific article data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple clinic locations, provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,000 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)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your visitors 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 choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send questions and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD)
The TrendMD plugin will add 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, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your health and fitness-related website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your site.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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