I developed my first website in 1997 detailing my experience as I moved through the process of adopting our son from Korea. It was modest, but meaty. (Today, I’d call that content-rich.) I knew it had the kind of information that other prospective and in-process adoptive parents would want. So I submitted to the numerous search engines available at the time, and waited for the traffic and the great ranking to appear.

After several weeks, nada. My ego was bruised and I was confused. The site had solid content so where were the visitors? Then fate stepped in …

A woman who worked for one of the leading engines at the time, Excite.com, emailed me and said she loved my site. She revealed that with a few changes to my html code, I could dramatically improve my traffic and ranking.

So I looked “under the hood” of my code, made her suggested changes, and voila, within a few weeks, my site was ranking in the Top 5 of every engine. (And today, still does.)

Amazing! That fortuitous email was the start of my interest in SEO, and like many of us at the time, I read everything I could about the subject. Some was technical, some not. But I was cobbling together little bits here and there.

Almost 10 years later, you’d think I’d know it all, but I don’t. As fast as you might learn, the technology, terminology and players change yet again. If it’s hard for someone like me whose working SEO/SEM knowledge is probably better than most, I can only imagine if I were just starting out. Yikes.

That’s why I know you’re going to benefit from the easy A to Z of SEO & SEM in the Search Engine Marketing Glossary

Developed by Aaron Walls, the major brains behind SEOBook, the Glossary is Aaron’s own FYI on the names and places, terms and phrases that continue to shape the SEO industry. From the definitions of a 404 page and the meaning behind the phrase, “above the fold” to “wikis” and “white hat SEO” (and lots of Yahoo related listings under Y) — reviewing this extensive glossary offered me a great refresher and introduced me to new terms and concepts like LSI, Latent Semantic Indexing.

Dozens of listings, all nicely indexed and neatly organized on a single page, the Search Engine Marketing Glossary is the kind of “link bait” (look that up, too) you’ll want to have at the ready as a bookmark or embedded as a permanent link in your tool bar.

And sooner is better than later :=)