There are numerous things you can do to get your site higher on the search engine rankings. However, you must make sure your site actually has a purpose and some decent content. Otherwise, search engines don't really no what to categorize it under (it's got no content so it cannot be assigned a particular category).
Firstly, make sure all of your pages are validating HTML. Although, not absolutely necessary I would do this just to make sure the search bots can read it properly.
Then, put meta tags with a description of approximately 50-100 words on each page which briefly describes what the page has on it and its purpose. Also put keyword meta tags and include about 30-40 words that fit to your page. For example, don't include the keyword "flowers" if your page is about computers. Although, this sounds obvious there are countless sites which think if they stick in thousands upon thousands of keywords they will get a higher ranking. They don't. After about the 50th keyword, most search bots ignore the rest. Also, I think I'm right in saying that if the keywords don't relate in one way to the content of the page they ignore them too.
Then, make sure each page is quite short. This is firstly so that readers don't get bored reading pages and pages of text but also because the more pages you have linked, the higher your ranking (the search engines know more of your site).
Another important tip is the TITLE of your page. Make sure it has the main keyword for the page in it near the beginning. But also make sure it isn't 50+ characters and contains thousands of keywords.
Make sure all of your images have ALTernate tags which are a short description of what the image is. However, if you're clever you would somehow incorporate one or two of your keywords into this description without making it sound like your marketing your site.
Submit your website to all of the major search engines and, most importantly, dmoz.org. Many major search engines use this human-developed directory to gather sites from. There are numerous tools on the Web for submitting your site to 100s of search engines. Use these tools but set up a new e-mail account, say a Hotmail one, which you use when submitting (if needed). Then when you're finished you can just leave the account for 30 days and it will close itself down. (This is so you don't get spam.)
Make sure your site is linked from other sites. If your pages have really great content, it is inevitable that people will link to it from their sites. Do yourself a favour and link back to theirs -- it's only courteous. To find out pages that are linked to yours in Google, you type link: yourdomain.com. The more links you have going to your site, the higher search engines will rank you. A good idea would be to become part of a link exchange where if you promise to link to someone else's site, they will link to yours.
You should choose a single keyword which describes your site or particular page and try to include this as the very first word on the page. The trick is to include your main keywords as many times as possible in your BODY text while still making it perfectly readable for your, well, er, readers.
Once you have interesting content, you are listed in the major search engines and people are linking to you, you are almost guaranteed to rise to the top of the ranking. There are many more other tips you could follow but I think I've covered most of the main ones here.
Just please don't have any advertisements or pop-ups on your site if you can. If it's a personal site, have a PayPal (or some other money system) set up on your site so people can donate money towards hosting costs or whatever. This way, if people like your content they are more inclined to donate money to you. One more thing: make your pages interesting to your readers -- you don't want it to sound like marketing druel. Basically, the motto is "if you're site has interesting content, you will receive visitors".
I hope this helps,
James
