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.

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.

Every site has to have enough text to allow for appropriately low keyword density. Unlike the standards of the'90s, modern search algorithms penalize sites, and sometimes penalize them severely, for cramming too many search terms, or even words that look like search terms, into too little text. Your content has to be long enough to dilute keyword density, but concise enough to captivate your visitors. This also means it is not possible to put every screen shot or image you might happen to have, no matter how attractive they are, on every page. The search engines have no way to index images. Words, not images, drive SEO. That is why every website designer has to give every site multiple pages with text that can be optimized.

Your next step is to make sure that you tag any images you use on your website with the "alt" tag in