A good tip I was given a couple years back was to make sure the coding is valid - lots of sites look great but throw up a lot of errors which can penalise them on a search.
I spent about a fortnight solid checking and correcting all the pages using the
validator.w3.org and my site went from page 10 to page 1 on a 'Google' for 'wild flowers', 'Irish wildflowers' etc and has stayed there ......