Optimize My Web Site Dictionary

Malda, Rob - Founder of Slashdot.org, a popular editorially driven technology news forum.

Manual Review - All major search engines combine a manual review process with their automated relevancy algorithms to help catch search spam and train their relevancy algorithms. Abnormal usage data or link growth patterns may also flag sites for manual review.

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Mechanical Turk - Amazon.com program which allows you to hire humans to perform easy tasks that computers are bad at.

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Meme - In The Selfish GeneRichard Dawkins defines a meme as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." Many people use the word meme to refer to self spreading or viral ideas. See: Techmeme - meme tracker which shows technology ideas that are currently spreading on popular technology blogs.

Meta Description - The meta description tag is typically a sentence or two of content which describes the content of the page.

A good meta description tag should:

Relevant meta description tags may appear in search results as part of the page description below the page title.

The code for a meta description tag looks like this

<meta name="Description" content="Your meta description here. " / >

See also: Free meta tag generator - offers a free formatting tool and advice on creating meta description tags.

Meta Keywords - The meta keywords tag is a tag which can be used to highlight keywords and keyword phrases which the page is targeting.

The code for a meta keyword tag looks like this; <meta name="Keywords" content="keyword phrase, another keyword, yep another, maybe one more ">

Many people spammed meta keyword tags and searchers typically never see the tag, so most search engines do not place much (if any) weight on it. Many SEO professionals no longer use meta keywords tags.

See also: Free meta tag generator - offers a free formatting tool and advice on creating meta description tags.

Meta Refresh - A meta tag used to make a browser refresh to another URL location.

A meta refresh looks like this; <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10;url=http://www.site.com/folder/page.htm">

Generally in most cases it is preferred to use a 301 or 302 redirect over a meta refresh.

Meta Search - A search engine which pulls top ranked results from multiple other search engines and rearranges them into a new result set.

See also: Myriad Search - an ad free meta search engine

Meta Search Engine - A website that takes your search query and passes it on to several different search engines and directories, then summarizes the results in a logical manner for you to review.

Meta Tags - People generally refer to meta descriptions and meta keywords as meta tags. Some people also group the page title in with these.

Microsoft - Maker of the popular Windows operating system and Internet Explorer browser.

Mindshare - A measure of the amount of people who think of you or your product when thinking of products in your category.

Sites with strong mindshare, top rankings, or a strong memorable brand are far more likely to be linked at than sites which are less memorable and have less search exposure. The link quality of mindshare related links most likely exceeds the quality of the average link on the web. If you sell non-commodities, personal recommendations also typically carry far greater weight than search rankings alone.

See also: Filthy Linking Rich [PDF] - Mike Grehan article about how top rankings are self reinforcing

Mirror Sites - Identical, but separate websites on different domains. They are commonly used legitimately by large websites to share heavy server loads, and by search engine spammers to generate more search engine referrals and revenue.

Movable Type - For sale blogging software which allows you to host a blog on your website.

Movable Type is typically much harder to install than Wordpress is.

See also: Movable Type.

MSN Search - Search engine built by Microsoft. MSN is the default search provider in Internet Explorer.

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Multi Dimensional Scaling - The process of taking shapshots of documents in a database to discover topical clusters through the use of latent semantic indexing. Multi dimensional scaling is more efficient than singular vector decomposition since only a rough approximation of relevance is necessary when combined with other ranking criteria.

MySpace - One of the most popular social networking sites, largely revolving around connecting musicians to fans and having an easy to use blogging platform.

See also: MySpace.com