If you are a small business owner who is planning to build a new website; or in case you are owner who is interested in modifying his website, then it is useful to keep the following factors in mind:
#1 Responsive web design
It is important to build a website that is responsive because nowadays most users access websites on mobile devices or on tablets, so apart from the desktop or PC enabled website it is also essential to have a responsive web design that can quickly adjust itself depending upon the size of the device on which it is being viewed.
Today more than 50% consumers make decisions of purchase within a day of viewing a website on local search engine listings and more than 78% of viewers make purchase decisions after looking at a website and then going to the store to make the purchase offline.
Creating a responsive design does not require much effort and you only need to ensure that the WordPress theme or template that you are using is responsive since the same static HTML template files can be used as is.
#2 important details should be mentioned in the text
As far as possible important details should be mentioned in the text and not in images because Google crawlers go after the text matter first and index it and do not crawl the text matter shown in images. Also it is essential to provide text in the SEO title of the page as well as the URL of the page. Without text there will be no context for the pages and this will affect rankings. The text matter also helps in content marketing.
#3Images in the website should be optimised
This can be done by ensuring that there is appropriate text mentioned in the ALT tag stating what the image is about. In addition a small caption below the image that describes the image is very beneficial. It ensures that the Google crawler indexes the image properly and users are able to read the text either when they hover their mouse over the image or when they visit the image.
#4 Create an easy navigation structure for the website
As per Google Webmaster Guidelines the navigation structure of a website should not be deeper than 3 levels. Ideally it should be a structure that allows linking between each page and each category and enables a user to quickly access the information that the user is seeking to achieve.
This could be done by creating a main navigation bar linking to the main pages of the website or a structure comprising categories, subcategories and others.
#5 Redirecting the users
It is quite possible that while redesigning your new website, users might visit the old link to your previous website and might not find any information over there. In such instances it becomes essential to create 301 that tell the Google crawler that your new page is the replacement of the old page. This enables you to keep the traffic and SEO authority of your previous page. In Word Press this is achieved through the Redirection plugin and in simple HTML websites this is achieved through the htaccess file on the webserver.
Users can also create a customised 404 page that provides them information that the link that they were searching is not available and guiding me to the new links on the website.
As a conclusion, one can say that SEO friendly website designing is as important as SEO itself.