There are two fundamental factors that go into every good website appearance and performance in the search engines. Every site owner needs his or her site to look good. This ensures that visitors will stay on the page. But you also need search engine optimization (SEO) to make sure that those visitors arrive at your pages in the first place. Integrating these two essentials of a good website can be complicated, and sometimes compromises are necessary to achieve an optimal balance between the two.

The place to start finding the balance between appearance and performance is SEO. If you never generate traffic, your beautiful page design will never be appreciated. The essentials of SEO include keyword density, linking between pages, meta tags, and proper tagging of images. Each of these factors is something to consider as you begin designing your site.

A successful site has to have enough content to allow for appropriately low keyword density. Unlike the ranking standards of the late 1990s, search algorithms in 2009 penalize sites, and sometimes penalize them very severely, for cramming too many search terms into too little text. Content must long enough to dilute keyword density, but concise enough to hold visitor attention. It is also not possible to make use of every screen shot or image you might happen to have, no matter how attractive and beautiful they are, on every page, or even on every site. The search algorithms have not yet designed means of indexing images. Words, and not images, are what drive SEO. That is the reason every designer has to provide every site multiple pages with text that can be optimized.

The next step in integrating web design and SEO is to tag all each image on the site with the “alt” tag in HTML. Every image has to have this tag. The “alt” tag enables to instruct the web browser as to which text will pop up when visitors run their mouse over your image. Every image also requires an SEO-friendly title. For instance if your site is about sunning on the beach in Aruba, and you want to use a photo of a beach on your page, a name like aruba.beach.wow.jpg isfar more effective than an name like 477876arub9wow.jpg. Keywords in your tags become keywords for your pages. Just take care not make your pages too keyword-dense with image names, either.

Another vital step in search engine optimization is linking the various pages of your site. Visitors always appreciate internal navigation. The search engines also appreciate internal navigation, because internal links are places you can insert keywords that identify your pages. For instance, if you have a page called “White Sand Beaches” you can link to that page from every other page in your site with a link entitled “White Sand Beaches.” This way you not only tell all search engines have created a page, but you tell the search engines what the page is about.

Is there an ultimate rule for integrating page design and SEO Yes, and here it is: Keep it simple! Use flash sparingly. Avoid excessive images. Shun complex design. Paying attention to these vital rules will boost your freedom to do SEO. You always want your pages to be beautiful, you just need to do more with less.