Rule number one: It's not an exact science!

There's no magic solution that will put your site on top of Google or other search engine results. There are, however, some strategies we can employ to help improve your search engine rankings. 

1. Load your site with relevant text
To get good search engine ratings, the most important thing is to have lots of text on your site that explains your services or the talents you're promoting. If you're selling apples, the word "apples" better be one of the first words on your homepage and sprinkled throughout the site along with all related services and accessories that you offer. Search engines like Google will eventually index this text and incorporate it into their rankings. The text must be good ol' html text, since search engines can't read text that's embedded in images (i.e., graphic text) or in Flash animations.

2. Give me a description and keywords that describe your business or services
Meta tags (e.g. "description" and "keyword" metatags) are code hidden in the html of your pages. Search engines see these tags, but viewers of the site don't. When I design your site, I'll include these in your html to help your search engine rankings.

3. Get other sites to link to your page
Ask your friends or business associates to link to your page from their own websites. Post links to your website on relevant places throughout the Internet: on blogs, guestbooks, myspace etc. (but use good netiquette when doing so... don't spam, pressure or annoy people). When there are many other websites out their linking to your page, your search engine rankings will become notably better.

4. Give it time, and be realistic
Your site won't show up in search engines immediately. It takes time for search engines to index all the text and meta tags on your site and reflect them in searches. It may take days or weeks for it to show up at all. Be patient. After months and years of keeping your site fresh and employing rules 1-3 above, your page rankings will steadily improve.

There's more to it than that, but that covers the basics. When I build your site, I'll employ these and other strategies to help boost your search engine rankings. However, I make no promise that your site will be #1 in all search engines.