Every designer knows that there are two basic qualities of every good website appearance and performance in the search engines. It is critically important for pages to look good to keep visitors on the page. But visitors will never arrive at the site to enjoy that good design without search engine optimization (SEO). Integrating these two fundamentals of effective website design can be complicated, and compromises are sometimes required.

Finding the balance between appearance and performance starts with SEO. If you don’t generate traffic, it doesn’t make any difference how beautifully you design your pages. The essential aspects of search engine optimization include linking between the pages of your site, backlinking to other sites, meta tagging, proper tagging of images, and keyword density. Each of these factors plays a role when 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’90s, 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 key step in search engine optimization is including links between the pages of your site. Visitors appreciate internal navigation. The websites also appreciate internal navigation, because these links are places you can place keywords that identify your pages. For instance, if you have a page called “Dolphins in Belize,” you can link to that page from every other page in your site with a link entitled “Dolphins in Belize.” This way you not only signal the search engines that you have created a page, but you tell them what the page is about.

The ultimate rule for integrating page design and SEO is to keep design simple. Using flash sparingly, avoiding excessive images, and shunning complex design will boost your freedom to do SEO. You don’t have to make your website unattractive, you simply need to do more with less.

Justin Harrison is a leading Internet Marketing consultant responsible for the Internet Marketing strategies behind some of the biggest online brands including Amazon, BBC, MasterCard and many others.