The homepage of your site should be clear and easy to understand. Try to avoid frames on your homepage. (Some engines don't react well to frames)

Title

The Title of your page is one of the most important criteria looked at. Relevant keywords in the title are crucial. Get 2 or 3 major keywords in your title while keeping it interesting, this alone will increase your chances of getting on top of a search results.

More than 2 or 3 will push you further down on a search results. Less keywords are better because the more power or density those keywords become.

Keyword Density

The homepage of your web site is very important. It is where people decide to stay and see what you have to say or leave. You don't want too many graphics on your first page because it will download slowly, leading to visitors to leave. You should have some graphics that appeal to the eye but keep it to a minimum. Have around 2 or 3 different colors in the text and section off paragraphs and different topics with dividers so it doesn't seem all bunched up. An acceptable download time is around 20 seconds. Basically keep the homepage short and sweet so people can view your page quickly, get an idea of what your page is about. Try to avoid frames on your homepage.

Remember: Not everyone has fast modems and good browsers, so consider others when designing your site.

Domain Name

The domain name is a great way to get your site good placement in Major Search Engines.  (www.keywords.com)

Don't Keyword Spam

Do not keyword spam. You've probably seen it many times at the bottom of web sites; web designers write keywords many times over and over at the bottom to get higher placement. Don't keyword spam in the META tags, or anywhere for that matter.

All major engines will penalize your site's placement if you keyword spam.

Get Your Site Web Listings Multiple Times on Most Engines.

To get your site listed multiple times - Individually register every page in your site as a separate site search engines will list it multiple times.

Example:

www.yourdomain.com <--register as main page in site.
www.yourdomain.com/subpage 1<--register as separate site.
www.yourdomain.com/subpage 2<--register as separate site and so on.

Make sure and have these sub-pages link to your main page so people can view your main page.