Here are some quick tips to ensure your website performs well in search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo:

1. Decide on the keywords you are going to target and stick to them.  You will usually want to hand-pick some three word phrases, preferably without stiff competition from elsewhere. 
2. Ensure the content on your website is rich in the keywords you have chosen.  You can also set the meta keywords, but this is less important these days - instead pay particular attention to the title and headings of your pages.
3. Check your content is still useful and readable for your human visitors, as they will quickly spot keyword spam and leave your site.
4. Write two short sentences that describe your site, and make sure they're in the meta description tag.  This is usually used by Google to generate the short description of your site visitors will see in the search engine results pages (or SERPs).
5. Submit your website to search engines, either manually, or by using one of the many available free submission tools.
6. Submit your website to DMOZ, a free human edited directory of the web which is useful to improve your ranking in other search engines.  Don't despair if it takes months for your listing to show up - this is normal.
7. Conduct some 'off-site' optimisation - in simple terms adding links to your site from other websites.  Perhaps you could join some business listings directories, write a guest blog post on a third-party blog, or send a short press release to a relevant online publication.  Whatever you do, try to ensure the links to your site are on respected websites which attract a decent amount of traffic, and which are mostly on a topic related to that of your site. 
8. Don't be tempted to try so called 'black-hat' techniques such as placing transparent text on your website, adding heaps of irrelevant keywords, or swapping links with untrusted sources.  These can all potentially reduce your ranking or even get you barred altogether!
9. Sign up for the free Google Analytics service and place the tracking code on your website.  This is an invaluable tool for seeing where visitors are coming from, what they're looking for, and which pages are causing them to exit your site.
10. Use a website evaluation tool such as WooRank to regularly check your site's performance, and make the tweaks that it recommends.

We hope you find these tips useful, and if you have any questions don't hesitate to get in touch.