SEO Information Glossary
Frequently Used Search Engine Optimization Terminology
AB - C D - E F G - H I - J K L - M N - O P Q - R S - T U - V W X Y Z
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Manual Submitting – The process of submitting by hand to an individual search engine, rather than using an automated submission tool or service. Automated submission is frowned upon by the search engines and can cause trouble.
Meta Description – a meta tag within the HTML of a webpage that contains a short description the page's content. Used to influence a pages description in the search results, it bears little influence over actual search ranking. The description must accurately reflect the content of the page or it may be considered spamming.
Meta Keywords – a meta tag within the HTML of a webpage that lists keywords relevant to the page's content. Because of search engine spamming and abuse, this tag provides little to no benefit to most search engine rankings. Yahoo! is one of the few remaining search engines that place importance on meta keyword tags.
Meta Search – This is a query that is submitted to more than one search engine or directory and displays results reported from all those sources. There is a Meta search engine at http://www.metasearch.com, which will conduct a search of searches.
Meta Search Engine – Examples of meta search engines include Ask Jeeves, Dogpile, Infind, Metacrawler, Metafind and Metasearch. They are servers that pass queries on to many search engines and/or directories and then summarize all the results for the searcher.
Meta Tag – As part of the HTML header of a web page, a Meta tag provides valuable information to the indexing spider (for the purpose of better indexing) that is not visible to web browsers. Content within the Meta tags, such as the TITLE, KEYWORD and DESCRIPTION Meta tags are used by many of the top search engines in determining how your pages are ranked.
Mirror Sites – Mirror sites are duplicate copies of web sites or web pages. Found on different servers, often the mirror site will lead the visitor to the originating website.
Misspellings – The practice of purposefully misspelling words used in keywords, titles, alt tags and page names. It is used as an optimization strategy to take advantage of the misspelled keywords and phrases entered into search engines by users.
Multiple Domain Names – When additional domains are used to store content rich pages and mirror sites in order to increase the number of keyword listings or create additional themes. Can be considered by search engines to be duplicate content and therefore a spamming technique.
Multiple Keyword Tags – When more than one Keyword Meta tag is used in an attempt to increase relevancy. Considered by search engines to be a spamming technique.
Multiple Titles – When the HTML title tag in the header section of a page is repeated for the purpose of improving search engine positioning. Considered by search engines to be a spamming technique.
MSN – An acronym for Microsoft Network and their search engine
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Navigation Bar – a web site's navigation icons, usually arranged in a row down the left hand side or along the top to provide visitors with easy access to other pages on the website.
Negative SEO – The act of demoting a page or site from the SERPS. Most often used against a competitor that is above your site in the SERPS.
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