Magellan - A discontinued directory. Once listing only the very best of the best web sites.

Manual Submission - The process of manually submitting a Web Page to a search engine or directory as opposed to using submission software or a submission service. Manual submission is considered by many to be the only reliable form of submission, although some programs and services have begun distinguishing themselves as viable options.

Marketing Plan - The part of the business plan outlining the marketing strategy for a product or service.

Mass Submission - A service offered by many SEO companies to submit subject website to thousands of search engines. Usually mass submission is not worth the time or money. Actually there are no thousands of search engines. There are 1000s little known directories, Link Farms and FFA web sites.

Match - A match occurs when a document in the search engine's index contains terms entered as part of the query. The matching documents, simply called matches, are then displayed on the SERP. It's worth noting that search engines have different criteria for deciding when a document is a match. Most search engines only require that one word in the query match one word in the document. Some search engines, require all words to appear in the document before that document is considered a match. (see also: Boolean Search)

Match Driver - A system introduced by Overture in 2002, it maps an advertiser's max bid on any form of a search term to the terms that Overture deems to be related to the intent of the searcher. What this means is that you can get traffic from related terms you did not think of, but also that you could pay for traffic you did not intend to target.

MB - Megabyte - 1,000,000 Bytes

Media Kit - A resource created by a publisher to help prospective ad buyers evaluate advertising opportunities.

Meta Description Tag - An HTML Tag imbedded in the web page heading source code that has a basic description of the site to help search engines rank it accordingly.

Meta Keywords Tag - An HTML Tag imbedded in the web page heading source code that is allow include a list of keywords appropriate for the web page.

Meta Refresh - An HTML Tag imbedded in the web page heading source code that is used to reload or refresh the page after a specified interval, often use to automatically redirect visitors to another page. Most search engines penalize pages that use Meta Refresh or any other type of automatic redirection.

Meta Robots Tag - An HTML Tag imbedded in the web page heading source code that is allows page authors to prevent their web page from being indexed by a search engine. (see also: Robots.txt)

Meta Search - A search performed on a Meta search engine.

Meta Search Engine - A type of search engine. Meta search engines usually do not maintain they own databases and does not compile its own results, but rather pulls data from two or more other search engines. A search engine that displays results from multiple search engines.

Meta Tag - An HTML Tag imbedded in the web page heading source, which describes some aspect of that page and not displayed on the page itself. The initial idea was that webmasters should use these tags to help search engines index the page correctly by providing an accurate description of the page content and a list of keywords associated with the page. Meta Tags are read by the some of the search engines and used to help assess the relevance of a site to a particular search. Good list of usable Meta Tags you can find here: http://vancouver-webpages.com/META/metatags.detail.html

Meta Tag Generator - The tool that will generate Meta Tags based on input page information.

Meta Tag Masking - An old trick that uses CGI codes to hide the Meta Tags from browsers while allowing search engines to actually see the Meta Tags.

Metadata - Data about Data. Meta Tags or what are officially referred to as Metadata Elements, are found within the section of web pages.

Metajacking - The use of copyrighted names and slogans in Meta Tags.

MFA - Abbreviation for Made For AdSense. A term that describes websites that are created entirely for the purpose of gaming Google Adsense to make money.

MIA - Abbreviation for Missing in Action

Microchunk - To split up a product or service sold traditionally as a package, offering each piece to buyers a la carte.

MIME - Abbreviation for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions

Mining Company - Former name of the About.com web directory.

Mirror - The almost identical duplicate website or page. Mirrors are commonly used to target different set of keywords and/or keyphrases. Using mirrors is a violation of the rules of most search engines and could be a reason for banning.

Mirror Site - Duplicate copy of a web site already in existence, used to increase response time for high-volume sites and to reduce network traffic or improve the availability of the original site. Mirror sites are useful when the original site generates too much traffic for a single server to support.

MIT - Abbreviation for Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MLM - Abbreviation for Multi Level Marketing

MMC - Abbreviation for Microsoft Management Console

Mobisode - TV shows shot exclusively for mobile phones.

MoBlog - Short for "My Mobile Blog", a service from Blogger that when send an email to Blogger from cell phone; it automatically creates a new blog entry.

Mociology - The study of how people adapt and use wireless technologies.

Moderator - The person who is trusted by the forum administrator to help control discussions stay productive and within the guidelines.

Mod-Rewrite - A module in Apache servers that can be used to rewrite requested URLs on the fly and supports an unlimited number of rules. This can be used to offer both user and search engine-friendly URLs, thus increasing indexing chances especially for a dynamic database-driven website.

Mosaic - An early web browser developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. It was the first cross-platform browser. Mosaic became the precursor to Netscape. (see also: NCSA)

Mousetrapping - The practice of using browser tricks and/or scripts to keep visitor on a web site. Typically these involve disabling the back button and the close button or using pop-up windows that usually multiply each time the visitor closes one. (see also: Circle Jerking)

Mozilla - An early, open-source web browser.

MP3 - Stands for "MPEG Third Layer" a standard for storing and transmitting music in digital format across the Internet.

MS - Abbreviation for Microsoft

MSP - Abbreviation for Managed Service Provider

MSSQL - Abbreviation for Microsoft Sequel Server

MUD - Abbreviation for Multi User Dungeon

Multi-Domain Plan - A web hosting plan that allows multiple domain names to share the resources of the single hosting account.

MWR - Abbreviation for Most Wanted Response, a term referring to the aim of a web site, for example, to generate a sale or to get the visitor to subscribe to a newsletter.

MySQL - Popular Open Source Database