Site indexes and glossaries
A hand-built, back-of-the-book index of every topic on your website, and a glossary that defines your field's terms in plain language, both kept current as the site grows.
Search boxes and menus serve people who already know what they're looking for. A good index serves the reader who knows the idea but not the word your site uses for it, and it shows every page where a topic comes up, with the main treatment marked. A glossary does the same for vocabulary. Both are old tools from print publishing, and both turn out to suit search engines and AI systems, which read them as a dense, well-linked map of what the site covers and how its pages relate.
Who it's for
- Publishers, associations, and nonprofits with years of articles, reports, and resources.
- Professional firms whose sites hold large libraries of guides or insights.
- Documentation and knowledge-base sites where readers search for concepts, not page titles.
- Any site that has outgrown its navigation.
How it works
I read the site the way an indexer reads a book. Each page gets headings for the topics it treats, people and organizations it names, and the questions it answers, with subheadings where a topic splits, cross-references between synonyms, and the main discussion of each topic marked so readers go there first. The glossary collects the terms a newcomer would stumble on and defines each in a sentence or two, linking to the page that explains it in full.
The index lives as structured data in your site's repository or content system, and the page is generated from it. A build check lists any new page that hasn't been indexed yet, so the index stays complete as content is added. This site carries an index and a glossary built this way, linked from the footer.
What you get
- An A to Z index page covering every page on the site, with subheadings and cross-references.
- A glossary page, alphabetized, with each term linked to its fullest treatment.
- The underlying data file and a short guide for adding entries when pages are published.
- A check in the build or publishing workflow that flags unindexed pages.
Why it helps search
An index adds hundreds of descriptive internal links, written as the topic names readers use, pointing at the pages that cover each topic best. That's the kind of linking search engines use to understand a site's structure, and it gives AI systems a clean list of what the site knows about. It also exposes gaps: a topic with one thin mention, or two pages competing for the same subject, shows up plainly in an index.
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