Part 2: General Rules of Ranking

Search engines use location and frequency of words placed. So words should be on prominent location.
Density (no of key words appearing on you site) is also taken into consideration.
There are some off the page ranking factor that should be kept in mind.
1. Link Popularity
2. Page Importance
3. Page reputation
4. Click through measurement.
Different search engines give rank to website based on the above factors. Keep in mind one thing, a website may have a very good page rank on one search engine, but may not have the similar ranking on the other.
I'll discuss all the above factors later on my blog.
Before improving your website ranking, you need to have
1. Google toolbar for checking your page rank in Google search engine.
2. Yahoo toolbar for checking your page rank in yahoo search engine.
3. MSN toolbar for checkng page rank in msn search engine.

Download at least one toolbar and make the page rank property enabled.
It is important for the site to have all its pages indexed. Because more pages you site has more batter will be its page rank. However if you have lots of pages but search engine has indexed very few pages, it means you will not get the page ranking you are looking for.
Too see how many pages google has indexed.
go to google search and write
site:your site url
Google will show the number of pages it has indexed. If google has indexed few of your pages, it means that google hasn't crawled all your pages. So there may be a problem(will discuss later) and you should remove the errors in order to make it easier for the search engine to find and then save your pages.