In Part One of this guide on ways to build your medical or health web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Providers Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Businesses
- Your Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WP Plugins – Improve Your Website’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Improve Website Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your health or medical website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase 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:
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Use this WordPress plugin to set up and manage a forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health-related business.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving engagement with your users
- Provides you with other ways for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and give them something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to fitness applications, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. A contact form also allows users to provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct area.
Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins And Themes
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, such as medical practices, physicians, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make online bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available and includes many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If you run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule your event and start accepting registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are many you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate 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)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets logged-in 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 various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI 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 to show users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Data 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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 changes the layout of data in your post content 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 can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, 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 doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, 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 the doctor their question and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
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, 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 insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Custom Post Type 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)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and 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 – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add exercise images to your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we will be discussing medical themes for WordPress.
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Click on this link to continue:
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