Forum Moderators: not2easy
...a health-related website focusing on a specific disease.Should I just find a medical professional to...cite the information?
One presumes that there is at least one charitable organisation that is dedicated to either offering support to sufferers and/or developing research in order to seek a cure?
If your site and content is serious in its intentions, then I would look to make contact with the head of one of the organisations and state that you would like their involvement in order to:
a) determine whether your content and the advice therein is medically/clinically accurate and/or offers accepted best practice with a view to
b) ensuring that your visitors receive the best information available: information that they (the visitors) can be sure is medically/clinically accurate and/or offers accepted best practice.
What better way than to have a recognised lead body look over and provide, ultimately, a stamp of approval as to the veracity of both the content on your site and the site itself.
In return for their doing this, tell them that you will:
a) make a donation to their charity, or a related charity of their choosing, and
b) will display their logo prominently on your site - with a link to theirs, and will devote a page to profiling the organisation and its goals. Ask them to write this for you.
In return you will get
a) the assurance (for you, your visitors and your advertisers) that your content is of value, because it has been reviewed by this organisation, and
b) their unspoken and unofficial endorsement: a legitimisation - effectively a seal of approval...
Having done exactly this many times professionally, I can tell you that it's very, very effective - on all counts.
Syzygy
[edited by: Syzygy at 5:27 pm (utc) on Feb. 14, 2008]
Unfortunately many organizations don't want to get involved with "for-profit" organizations like mine. So I'm not sure that would work.
As a commercially-driven enterprise you lack the special resources and expertise that these type of organisations have. You have a responsibility to the public and you need to ensure that the correct message and advice is given to them. All you want is reassurance that your content gives that message and has the level of accuracy (clinical) needed; that sufferers and their families get the best advice possible.
At the same time, it would give the organisation the opportunity to extend its work as "spokesperson" to the people who need the support the most: it would be able to "reach out" where it had the greatest impact - among those seeking advice and insight at a time of need.
Surely the organisation would want to ensure that any advice given is correct as correct can be, no matter form where it came.
Certainly, that's what you tell them...
Up until a few months ago, I worked at a pure profit-driven publishing company in London. In my time there I probably worked with 30-40 industry bodies on exactly the basis I'm describing. It works.
Syzygy
we are often outranked by federal and state organizations that are harder to navigate and understand
A bit off-topic, but links from those organizations are probably the most valuable links you could get.
I had a site (since sold, and the domain name now used for an entirely different purpose) that ranked #5 for my city name. It was the first site listed that was not a government site or chamber of commerce.
I'm pretty convinced that the reason it ranked so high is that it was linked-to from every site above it in the SERPs.
Even though we have correct, complete, information - and more of it for that matter -
So where do you get the information? A good, legitimate source of your information is what you'd want to cite. Or take it a step back, if you can. It's nice to get info from WebMD, but if WebMD talks about a NEJM article on your topic, check it out - a report based on info from NEJM is better than one from WebMD. A little nosing around through the medical literature will very likely come up with some interesting material on your topic, and it comes with built-in citations.
I'm not sure what you mean by finding "a medical professional to go through my site and cite the information." Do you want your information quoted elsewhere on the web? The ideas already given for links, etc., would help with that. You're not really going to get cited unless you publish in a medical journal.
Or do you want the medical professional to put some kind of a stamp of approval on your site? Lots of publications have "medical boards" made up of doctors who are experts in different fields - When a publication wants to print an article that covers a health issue, they contact the doctor(s) on the board with that area of expertise and run the article by them to see if it passes muster or has to have changes made. And, yes, I do know this from the "inside". I also can make a pretty good guess that there are doctors who work regularly on cases with your law firm, or maybe even doctors who are part of the law firm. Depending on what type of legal work the firm does, it may or may not be ethical for those doctors to tie their names to your website, but if it isn't they could probably recommend other medical professionals for the position. If the site basically deals with only one disease, you'd have an easier time finding your necessary experts than more general magazines do. Unless it demands a lot of time, you should be able to find some that will do this for free; likely candidates include (1) retired or about-to-retire doctors who've worked in the field and still enjoy keeping in touch with it, and (2) young doctors - or other health professionals - who want to get their name visible and who think that "Medical Consultant to MyDisease.com" would look good on a CV.
Since the websites will discuss diseases and such, I want to create some sense of credibility like you say. My idea is first to have an About page, that describes who I am and what my credentials are. Secondly, I plan to solicit articles, even brief ones, from my colleagues and from some of the doctors I work with, and I plan to quote their work, with their permission of course. Then I could add them to the contributors page.
The third thing is that no medical content is really original. I will refer to textbooks and journals for my information, even though I may rephrase it to make it easier for the lay person to read, and may add details and findings from some of the latest research I am reading up on. Adding these references will help, because then people know where to go and look for more information, or to validate information.
Finally, getting linkbacks from the authority sites will help a lot too, but that might be the harder part.
Just my 2c
