In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your health-related web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Medical 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 medical or health services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- 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:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Website’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress Themes – An Overview
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Website Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin lets you run your own social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Run your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value information and give users something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to medical calculators, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Readers can provide feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose the section of the center they want to reach. This helps visitors get their comment to the right person.
Provide A Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins For Medical And Health Businesses
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, such as dental practitioners, surgeons, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule an event and begin receiving online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical uses, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, FENa Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets 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 the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
This plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific 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, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about 14,000+ conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your visitors 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts 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 – WordPress Plugin)
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 great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, 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. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting 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, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise illustrations inside your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we discuss health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part two.
To view the rest of this article, click this link:
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