help acheiving search engine acknowledgement

Hello,
I have been building my site with dreamweaver. I'm not sure quite how search engines work; but is there a place to put in keywords or tags which will help my site to come up.....say if they googled' my name and photography and state or something, I'd be a top hit.
Any help or tutorials. Does the search engine read directly from every pages html?
cheers
micah

Maybe you should review the W3C HTML recommendations for the header meta-data.

That is only a start to getting better seach hits. Hopefully someone can suggest good tutorials too. It seems to be an ever changing art to keep you page near the top.

[EDIT]: I missed this the first time. A page describing helping search engines.

It's very simple, just follow Google's instructions:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

Content is king. So is having lots of sites link to you.