If the content you use in your site is in the public domain (which is highly discouraged) make sure that you at least give it an original title, and add an opening and a closing paragraph of your own.
This takes a little while, but if, after waiting, you still can’t find your page near the top, you should try rewriting your title and your first and last paragraphs. It doesn’t take much, often just changing a few words will give you the right results.
And of, course there’s the use of keyword tools that may aid you in finding some good keywords to include on your page that will drive visitors to your site more and more.
So those are about the basic techniques in search engine optimization. You can find a lot of computer tools to aid you in doing this, and of course, Google is a great place to search for this.