1. Clarify your goals:

Quite obviously you will have a better chance of meeting your goals if you have clearly identified them. Perhaps your objective is to maximize ad revenue from your site. Maybe you just want to draw as many visitors as possible. Maybe you want to draw visitors from a particular demographic group. Once you know what you want to achieve, you will be able to think about how to achieve it.

2. Note what's working and what's not:

Let's say you have a pet site, for example. Do the sections on cats and dogs outshine the rest? Maybe you can expand them or add a similar section on rabbits. Is the section on birds relatively unpopular? Perhaps there are ways it could be improved. Alternatively, maybe the site would be better off focusing strictly on furry pets.

Similarly you can evaluate your site in terms of the various elements. If your content is great, but the pages are ugly, you might want to consider changing the font or making other stylistic changes. If it is too cluttered up with pictures, it could be time to get rid of some of them. If the site is hard to read, maybe some of the longer paragraphs should be broken up.

3. Study the competition:

Take a look at some other web sites with similar topics. Is there something that their sites are doing that yours is not? Are their pages more attractive? Do they provide more information? Is there an area that they are neglecting, providing you with an opportunity to carve out a unique niche for your site?

4. Review, edit, and correct:

Of course it is a good idea to try to find and correct spelling errors, bad punctuation, and so on. If you're like me, you are not a perfect speller or typist, so you make your share of these. It's best to catch them right off the bat, of course, but sometimes I find that on subsequent viewings I will spot some errors of this nature that elude me on the first pass (or the second or the third). Of course, what I should do (but don't always) is to use a spelling/grammer checker before posting. Don't expect a spelling/grammer checker to do all of the work, however, as they don't always catch everything either.

Beyond finding and correcting simple grammatical goofs, however, it's good to look at the overall clarity of your writing. Does the article or paragraph convey the message that you want it to? Is it possible to say the same thing with more clarity, or to say it with fewer words, or to say it in a more interesting manner?

It's good to keep in mind that sometimes even a small change can have a major impact on the meaning. I once saw a personals ad in which a woman had written "please bare with me". What she almost certainly meant, I think, was "please bear with me", that is to say, "please be patient while I explain this." If one were to go strictly by the word she had used, however, one would obviously draw a very different conclusion as to her meaning.