I'm considering placing a glossary of terms (for this business) within the site.

a) does it help for related terms?

b) is it "legitimate" for site content?

In general, it's both helpful for visitors and adds keyword-rich content to your site, which is a win-win scenario, as long as it's done correctly (ie, it's a "real" glossery rather than a keyword dump).

Ian

Ahhh, Glossaries! A very under-utilised tool in the Webmaster's Arsenal.

Glossaries have for many functions, but they have to be done right. They provide valuable information to the user, and are a valuable resource for the webmaster.

The first thing I do when building a new site, particularly when on a new or unfamiliar topic, is build a comprehensive glossary. I find this very helpful for me to better understand the topic, and thus build a stronger site, both content and optimisation wise.

Providing a well constructed glossary adds to the overall value of the site, and increases the "authority factor" in the mind of the user.

Glossaries are also very usful as spider food, and can often generate referrals for phrases and word combinations you would not have thought of before, which can then be worked up as additional site pages if appropriate.

You will probably find you receive referrals and traffic for many obscure terms that are peripheral to the site, or that do not have many pages in the SE's indexes. I often get traffic via glossaries for sites when the rest of the site is suffering from sandy effects. :D

A few tips:-

- As mcanerin says, make sure it really is a glossary and not just a collection of keyword targets. Build it for the user, not the spiders.

- Don't make it one huge long page that takes days to load. Split it up either alphabetically, or topically, and if necessary, generate multiple pages per letter/category to keep the pages mid-sized. I tend to go for 10-20 short definitions per page.

- Don't have one page per term/definition UNLESS you have atleast two paragraphs about the term. Nothing annoys users more than searching for a definition and landing on a whole page devoted to a two word definition of a term. Waste or electrons. If you only have short definitions for your terms then combine them on single pages as per above. Of course, you could do both - short definitions of many terms on one page, with links to extended information on seperate pages.

- When you have completed your glossary, submit it to glossary and dictionary directories for additional links and traffic.

- Last point, if you are doing topic centric terminology and defintions, then please make sure you do call it a glossary. Dictionaries as language based and often relational. Big difference, and one often misunderstood.

Onya
Woz

Dear Woz, or anyone else, who knows where one can submit a glossary, could you please list some glossary directories?

Searching Google only shown www.glossarist.com, while www.glossarydictionary.com seems to be not a reliable dictionary.

Thanks in advance.

Hehe, well if that doesn't put me in a difficult position I don't know what does,

Glossarist.com is my site, so modesty (and self-promotion rules) dictates that I should say no more on that matter. :D

glossarydictionary.com is a parked domain so will not be of use to you.

There are other Glossary lists out there, although there are few other Glossary Directories in the pure sense of a directory.

Some of the more popular lists are:-
Frank Deitz's Glossary Collection (http://www.frankdietz.com/glossary.htm)
Glossaries by Language (www.lai.com/glossaries.html )
Glossary List (http://stommel.tamu.edu/~baum/hyperref.html) - not updated
Your Dictionary (http://www.yourdictionary.com/) has sections on glossaries
DMOZ also has a section for Dictionaries by Subject (http://www.dmoz.com/Reference/Dictionaries/By_Subject/), a title I question, but useful nonetheless.

These would be some of the mains ones, there are a few others but I will have to search my bookmarks.

If you are looking for glossary lists on a particular subject, then search for "KEYWORD glossaries" at your favourite search engine and you should find some. By serarching for the phrase, ie, using quotations marks, then you get better results, particularly on Google who would otherwise use stemming thus clouding the results.

I would imagine that should give you enough resources to hunt through.

Onya
Woz

Thank you for your reply.

Actually finding nothing brought me to this thread.

I'll poke around more, perhaps there actually are places where I can submit my glossaries.

Thanks again for your response.