Setting up a website for many, is just a matter of fun; it is a place where family and friends exchange notes, information and niceties. However, with time, you the novice, would get bored with just playing post office and begin to think of how to use your website as a money making tool. This is when you would look for aspects that could improve the profitability of your website.

The profitability of your website depends upon two major aspects: (1) visibility to the surfer and (2) visibility to the search engines. Below are ten tips that would help you in your endeavor.

1. Create an easily (user-friendly) website - anyone who lands at your web site should be able to find their way around without too much clicking of the mouse or redirections. In most cases, if your visitor does not get what they want in three clicks, the fourth click would be out of the website.

2. Offer valuable and qualitative freebies at regular intervals - let people know your website by its high quality freebies. You could give up-to-date information, coupons, discounts, reports, free advice, etc which is highly valued by your customers.

3. Content is king, use it to your advantage. There is nothing that can beat good content yet. Write articles, newsletters, press releases, etc. and submit these at as man directories you can.

4. Provide updates on your products - most of your customers would love to hear about updates on the product or service they normally use. Ensure that they are informed about it. Alert them with an email, which will prompt them, visit your web site.

5. Have the right buttons where they are visible. The "buy it now", "contact us", "email us", "live chat", "ask a quote" buttons should be extremely visible, accessible and always linked well.

6. Have adequate information on each product or service you provide. This would prevent unnecessary doubts, and also convince the customer to buy faster.

7. Ensure high security for payment and other financial transactions. Your customer needs to feel secure when they make payment. Enlist with the best security certificates so your customer is protected from any type of fraud.

8. Use bright and descriptive images. A picture is indeed worth a 1000 words. Remember, you can score double by indexing your picture with keyword names so the engines would read them correctly and use this for ranking.

9. Collect respectable links. Search engines attribute great value to websites linked well. Initially, use reciprocal links until you build quality content so you could link with high-end websites.

10. Constantly work at improving visibility. Whether it is SEO, building links, submitting articles with search engines, advertising for free or payment, and so on, you need to keep at it 24x7. In order to build traffic, you need to work initially almost non-stop.

All this and a lot of hard work until you get your website ranked on the top two SERP (search engine result pages) and you have had it made. It is said that about 75-80% of people find websites trough organic searches. These tips, plus continuous SEO, would get you there and bring you enough traffic to make your website as profitable as it could be.