Your CV is a representation of yourself and as such you should put significant work into it to ensure that it represents you in the best light possible. Not wanting to state the obvious, make sure it has no spelling mistakes (spell check!), that your career is in chronological order with most recent first, and that it starts with a 5 or 6 line summary of yourself (profile). Avoid tables and complex formatting as this makes it difficult for automatic CV parsing tools (i.e transferring CV data to a database) to read your CV.

Make sure it is formatted correctly (same font throughout - Arial, Verdana), Headings in Bold 12pt, Subheadings in Bold and Italic 11pt and body text 10pt. Avoid multiple colours (Monochrome Dark grey/Black OK) and don't put your picture on it. People like conformity and are resistant to change unless it is very beneficial. Try and keep your CV to two pages in length and put publications / abstract etc. at the end in an appendix. This allows you to get the information in you want, yet still keep the main body of the CV in a manageable format. I have put together a couple of CV templates in the next section which you can download as word documents and modify as you see fit.