So you have a new business and are ready to either create your own or employ someone else to create you a shiny new website. Here are a few top tips which you should follow in order for the site to work as hard for your business as you do.

Keep it simple
A website is fundamentally either a source of information or another vehicle for selling your products and services. Your customers are highly likely to want a pleasant experience and most importantly, not get frustrated with a highly complex site. Therefore, whatever you do, please dont have a site using flash animations all over it, search engines find it difficult to find these, users generally hate them and worst of all, they make me want to throw stuff at my screen.

Make the site search engine friendly
This is really not that difficult. Optimising your site for search engines such as Google can be achieved with the following steps (dont worry if bits of this gets technical, you can skip pass this - but do look at the first point, its the most important) :

Content, content, content Generate relevant, keyword rich content and the search engines will love it, just as much as your users do.
Titles If you are familiar with H1 tags then make sure the titles on your pages are H1! These again should be keyword rich and relevant.
Meta data Long gone are the days when you can stuff a load of keyword into the meta tags, but optimising the titles, keywords, and descriptions should still be filled in as search engines do still use them, even if it is to a lesser extent than a few years ago.
Include a sitemap - Users can use this if they get a bit lost whilst wandering round your site and search engines spiders use them whenwell..wandering round your site.

So once you have your beautifully crafted, simple to use website, you need to do a bit of promotion so people actually come to it. I will very briefly describe 3 ways of attracting customers (there are many more articles which explain these in more detail.

Pay Per Click basically this is getting to the top of search engines such as Google as a sponsored link which you will only pay for once a user clicks on the ad. This is a great way of instantly generating traffic to your site and if set up correctly, the return on investment can be great.
Link Building getting other websites to link to your site will eventually propel you up the search rankings and give your users other avenues to getting to your site. Submit to as many free directories as you can and ask relevant websites for a link. Alternatively you can make your site so good that people will want to automatically link to you. Be wary however of companies offering to submit you site to link farms, this rarely works and search engines are likely to punish you for trying to trick them.
Promote your site as part of your traditional marketing sounds obvious but many small business dont promote their website on office stationary such as letter heads or at the bottom of their e-mail sign offs. Your website could well be your best marketing tool so make sure you promote it at every possible opportunity.