Gazingleo, if you are intending to do some serious business with your website, you must work on your website right from the beginning. As your website is a depiction of your business which makes it inevitable for you to pay utmost attention.

Your website should have all the qualities of a good salesman.It should be proficient with professional look and quality content, which can drive maximum traffic to the website. If your website is optimized for search engines right from the beginning, it would be easier to achieve high SERP ranks in the search engines.

The following factors are essential for a great website.

Great look

A great look can be achieved with a straight and simple layout. Adhering to the conventional style is more effective than any bizarre experimentation. In layout, convention rules, since people's eyes are seasoned with that look.

Browsers find overcrowded websites intimidating. You must leave sufficient background space to bring about a soothing effect.

Usage of graphic should be based on the relevance to the content.

Image size should be kept small, so that your page loads immediately.

The lesser use of moving images is advisable for an affiliate website to avoid interruption with the visitors.

Stylish font should be avoided as it becomes difficult to read and forces readers to abandon the site. The traditional Ariel, serif and San-serif prove to be the best choice while selecting fonts.

Quality content

To build a great website, it’s essential to make it content rich. And rich content shouldn’t necessarily have a rich, flamboyant language. Keep your language simple and crisp. Writing approach should be interesting to arrest your visitor’s attention.

Keep your content clean from grammatical and spelling mistakes. It creates a bad impression on your website if there are lots of mistakes which will ultimately affect your business.

Take care not to keep your paragraphs long, as it become tedious to go thru the entire stuff. Writing important matter in bullet point helps in easy and quick scanning for the visitor.

Above all these style and format comes the matter of the content itself. It should be relevant and unique. Don’t include unnecessary stuff just because you like it. Try to give something more or different than what other site are offering. Similar or same kind of information will drive out the visitor as soon as he enters.

Give clear picture about the product and services you are selling/endorsing. Elaborate on the benefits. Don’t hesitate to give your visitors clear information about the company.

Your content should be rich with keywords that are related to your business/product and services. Keywords should be subtly infused into the copy rather than making its presence too obvious.

Technicalities / Usability

Keep your links clean. Don’t make your website a web of links. Checking links in regular interval will help you find the broken or unnecessary links. You can either mend or completely remove these links from the website as per your need.

Add customer friendly features to your website so that they find it easy to navigate and place orders at your site (if at all you are intending to make some online sales). Some friendly features are as follows

• Shopping cart

• Simple order form

• Item saving facility

• Email alert

• Newsletter

• Blog for suggestions

The following hubs will help you to understand the SEO factors with better clarity.

Is your seo approach killing your website

Link building - A Google's perspective

See who is linking

SEO content writing - Things I should have thought before

How wrong I was I about web2.0 sites

How social bookmarking gave me the listing I wanted