GOOD NEWS, Kristi ! I can tell you everthing I know about search engine ranking in a few short words.
>Use your meta tags. Meta tag 'generators' are available free online. Choose your own words you think are right for your site. Try different groups of words you think visitors will use when trying to find a site like yours.
>Use your keywords often in the text on your site...gracefully, please. You apparently need several hundred words of text on a page for it to be taken seriously by search engines.
>Get as many other websites as possible to display your URL, especially good websites. Link exchanges can help here.
>I've seen websites ranked pretty high apparently for no better reason than they've been submitted thirty different ways using different pages, keywords and meta discriptions. This seems to work well for some pretty bad websites. A domain with a lot of pages must be good, right?
>Update your site with fresh content often.
>Buying hits might be worth the money. Better to buy targeted hits, but even non-targeted hits makes your site look more popular to a search engine. Make sure you have enough bandwidth before you buy a zillion hits.
Having said that, I thing page ranking is over-rated. I do a lot of searching and I don't mind scrolling down the lists until I see a discription I like.
Of course Google has ads here about increasing traffic - lol.