What is web site fitness?
A fit web site is a site that has been optimized to rank as highly as possible in search engines; thus “search engine optimization”. This tutorial will teach you how to position your site as highly as possible on search engines by outlining a twelve-week work out program for your web site. The background section serves as a warm up. Reading it will give you a broad general understanding of how search engine optimization works. Then as you move on and begin the work out you will use the resource section to delve into the web and learn the details of how all the different search engines and directories rank web sites.

What is search engine optimization?
Search engines and directories help people find relevant information on the Internet. Major search engines maintain huge databases of web sites that users can search by typing in some text. Search engine optimization is a set of modifications to web documents and requests for links that together improve how your site rates in the list of websites returned from a specific search.

Search engine optimization consists of the things you can do to a web site so that when a user wants (for example) group exercise and types group exercise into a search engine or directory, your optimized group exercise site appears as close to the top of the list of group exercise sites as possible.

What are search engines and directories?
A Search Engine is a program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where those keywords are found. These programs are known as spiders, robots or crawlers. These are programs that are sent out over the World Wide Web to gather data about sites. This process is called “crawling sites”. The information that these spider programs collect determines where a site is ranked. All of this is done without any human interaction other than the initial programming and maintenance. An example of a company that uses search engines is Google http://www.google.com.