Your well designed website is unable to attract the kind of traffic you expected, have you ever wondered why? The reason might be your website’s design not being SEO friendly. If you use SEO wisely, you can easily improve your search engine rankings as well as drive more traffic to your website. Here are a few elements that need to be considered to make a website design SEO friendly:

• Proper structure – Your website should have a proper structure and a well defined navigation path.
• Responsiveness – Your website should have a responsive design so that it can be easily accessed by desktop as well as mobile.
• Integrate Social Media – Integrate social media (Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and Facebook icons) into your website’s design to attract search engines as well as audiences.
• Use SEO for Images – Image optimisation is the most overlooked part, so optimise your images.

• Avoid using javascript redirects - Avoid using javascript redirects and remove them if they are there. This will help search engines to easily read and rank your website.

• Make user Friendly URLs - User friendly URLs help search engine robots to identify your page and its offerings. (Prefer "hyphens" to separate words to “underscores" in your URLs)
• Make sure your web design is accessible - If your website is not completely accessible, it will definitely affect your rankings as well as conversion rates.  So, make sure it is accessible on all browsers.
• Reduce Flash elements – Too much use of flash elements on a website can affect its performance. Search engines also ignore them, so avoid it.

  Quick tips:

1. Never ignore Google Webmaster Guidelines.
2. Optimise images.
3. Always update the sitemap of your website.
4. Ensure mobile compatibility.
5. Ease the navigation and eliminate the clutter.
6. Explain images and videos.
7. Make sure every page of your website is accessible.
8. Use categories and subcategories for products.
9. Always create simple text links in the "footer section" of your website.
10. Include text on every page of your website rather than images only.
11. Use the most effective content management system for your website.

Conclusion Simple changes can make your website competitive, SEO friendly and visible on the web. However, you also need to understand the behaviour of search engines and the way they read your website (check cache). This will help you to make your website strong and search engine friendly.