@Slappy Doo Hoo,
All the major search engines are primarily driven by links, so the very quick answer is that having the best links wins. In practice everyone competing knows this, so there is a lot to know in order to be the one with the best links out of all the others, but I can't explain that in one post, or even one thread. It's a full time job for many people, and it's like asking "how do you fix cars".
So for the easy answer, put the term in the page title, and in the body of the email, and get people to link to the page with the term as anchor text (e.g. when you see a link saying "click here" that is the anchor text of the link, or in other words the words that are turned into the link).