A key "trick" to having your website appear well in the search engines is to have the page content match the page title, page name, and header on the page for every page. So if your website is about apples, have a page about delicious apples, macintosh apples, etc. Give good content!!! 

 A second key "trick" is to have other sites link to your site ... BUT, those sites should be revelant. Like for the apple site maybe grocers sites would like to like to it, or apple growers. Exchanging links or being on listing sites does not help. Also, if your site has the exact same information as other sites... not good.

Good SEO companies do know a few more "White Hat" tricks to optimize a website while following the rules set by the search engines themselves. On the right, under "Info on Websites" you will see "Google Guidlines" and "Google Friendly Sites," a good start to knowing what is right.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art (not science) of making a website appear well on the top search engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and others. Since about 2002, Google has been the leader with more people using it to find websites, pictures, and other information than the other search engines.

The key reason people want their websites to appear on the first page of search results is so they get more visitors to their website.