SEO Glossary

• a
• b
• c
• d
• e
• f
• g
• h
• i
• j
• k
• l
• m
• n
• o
• p
• q
• r
• s
• t
• u
• v
• w
• x
• y
• z

Macintosh
Shortened form of Apple Macintosh. The Macintosh is a model of computer that was designed to use a purely graphical user interface. It made popular the use of pointing devices such as the mouse. It was also designed to be user-friendly and easy-to-use by hiding much of the technical aspects of computing from the user. Macintoshes became popular with graphic artists and musicians and remain so until today.

Machine-generated
A term used to describe web pages or content that were created by software and not by people. Such software often use templates to create pages that have a consistent look and feel. The term can also mean that such pages are not really meaningful for human users.

MAN
Acronym for Metropolitan Area Network.

Manual submission
The process of submitting website or webpage URLs to search engines by hand; that is, a user would visit a search engine website, go to the particular page for URL submissions, and then fill in details about the site or URL, including the URL itself. This is in contrast to automated submission, in which a program is used instead to submit URLs to search engines.

MB
Acronym for megabyte, approximately 1 million bytes.

Meme
An idea or concept that attains online popularity. Popular Internet memes include “All your base are belong to us,” ,” and the goatse man.

Metadata
Metadata is data that is used to interpret other data. Webpages can have a lot of metadata that is invisible to normal users. Some of this metadata is used to specify titles, headings, keywords, among other things.

Meta search
A type of search that involves searching a number of other search engines and resulting a total, combined result from all those search engines.

Meta search engine
A search engine that performs meta searches. See meta search, above.

Meta tag
Meta tags are HTML tags that web authors use to specify or emphasize certain types of metadata (see metadata, above). Meta tags and metadata are invisible to normal users and can only be seen by viewing the raw HTML code. There are a number of meta tags, see the individual definitions of each tag.

Metacrawler
A large meta search engine now called Go2net.com.

Metafind
Another meta search engine.

MIME
Acronym for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions.

Mining Company
The former name of About.com.

Mirror site
A mirror site, or simply mirror, is an exact duplicate of a web site, usually hosted on a different physical server. A mirror can serve many purposes. First, it can reduce some of the load and traffic to the main site. Second, accessing a mirror can be faster for some people in other parts of the world. Third, in the event the main site goes offline for any reason, a mirror can serve as a temporary backup.

Misspellings
In the context of search engine optimization, often it is necessary to consider the most common misspellings for keywords when doing keyword research and analysis. Search engines are quick to detect misspellings and often suggest the correct spellings for keywords, but they do not correct misspellings automatically. It is debatable whether or not the practice of deliberately inserting misspelled keywords in web pages is ethical or not. Some SEO experts include the

MLM
Acronym for Multi Level Marketing.

Module
In programming nomenclature, a module is a part or component of a program. In a well-designed system, modules perform only one simple task. Programs are built up of modules. Modules can also refer to other pieces of software such as plugins or add-ins.

Mouseover
The condition where a mouse pointer is allowed to stay over an item such as an image or a piece of text. Javascript can perform actions when the mouse pointer is hovered over certain elements on screen.

MSN
Acronym for Microsoft Network.

MSP
Acronym for Managed Service Provider.

Multi titles
An old unethical SEO technique where authors would repeat webpage titles on the same page as a form of keyword stuffing.

Multiple keyword tags
The unethical SEO practice of using more than one meta keyword tags in an attempt to increase ranking. It may be penalized by search engines.

Multimedia
The revolutionary advancement in computing that allowed the simultaneous and integrated use of graphics, sound, video, animation, as well as text. In the past, multimedia applications were few because of the expensive hardware required to run such applications. Nowadays, multimedia capabilities are commonplace and used to good effect on many websites.

MySQL
Pronounced “my ess cue el”, MySQL is an open source relational database management system. It is largely SQL-compliant and runs on a wide variety of operating systems. MySQL forms one of the bases for the popular LAMP server configuration, Linux Apache MySQL PHP/Perl/Python. Prominent users of MySQL include Yahoo, Amazon, LiveJournal, Slashdot, and Fiendster.

Back to Top