Laboratory Niche Website

Annals of Diagnostic Pathology published our article “Development of a Laboratory Niche Website” http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anndiagpath.2013.05.002. After the proofs were sent to us, we regrettably realized that the laboratory niche website had not been defined sufficiently. This post tries to clarify this term better.

Niche websites were introduced to the Internet as marketing entities. If you type the term “niche website” into a search engine’s query box, this is the only meaning that appears in the list of results. Now, however, every specialized elementary, or basic, website can be defined as a niche website. There are numerous niche websites in a wide variety of subjects, ranging from craft to politics.

A laboratory website can be a niche website due to the definite specialization of procedures. However, in contrast to the marketing niche websites’ tendency to narrow the scope of the website to avoid competition with the mainstream market products, the laboratory niche website presents a narrow area of technological interest in the context of the general methodological aspect.

At any given moment, laboratory niche websites seek a slate of visitors with highly specific interests. The website must have features that attract visitors by distinguishing itself from other sources of information.  There are certain specifics involved in the design of a laboratory website. The principles of the development a laboratory niche website are presented in the Annals of Diagnostic Pathology article by using our “Grossing Technology in Surgical Pathology” website (www.grossing-technology.com) as an example.

Every niche website host aims to achieve maximum visibility through search engines “service” transforming it into an authority website. This is a current term for a popular website in a specific area, e.g. the “niche of knowledge.”

A laboratory niche website has a specific presentation style. Reasonable fragmentation of the material most adequately reflects the discrete character of laboratory procedures. The fragmentation principle can be applied not only in the structuring of pages but also in the composition of the website itself.

Keeping in mind that nothing can substitute an informative content, formal methods of attracting search engines attention should be used. Marketing niche websites have collected useful experience in this regard that cannot be reasonably ignored. The initial fragmented pages of the website should be constructed with the clear awareness of the search engine robot spiders that “crawl” the Internet. When a niche website material on a particular subject is being presented, the strategic use of keywords in pages and posts will enhance the page rank of the website. Hyperlinks open a chain reaction of additional links, attracting attention to previous articles, which inevitably wane from attention over time. Thus, the laboratory niche website maintains its authority through its archives life cycle.

These are the additional comments to the article “Development of a Laboratory Niche Website” in the Annals of Diagnostic Pathology journal. The details of the methodological material fragmentation and methods of leveraging the laboratory niche website into an authority website require additional discussion, which will be presented in separate articles.