The best way to go about ranking highly in the search engines is to have quality content that is not only attractive to people but also to the spiders. There is a website
http://demo.sitesell.com that has a video tutorial that I would recommend. I do some web design at my w-2 job but have decided to build my web page for my business using this site's services as it handles all the web hosting, domain registration, SEO, etc. as part of the process. I could build a "prettier site" on my own but still chose this site because of all the "under the hood" stuff that you get. Start with Day 2 of the Action guide. The site does offer an affiliate plan which I am a part of but I don't want it to sound like I am pitching the site because of that so I am not including my affiliate link.