There are three ways to get your page ranked higher:
1) Follow Google & Yahoo’s guidelines. Like these: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters…
2) Quality links/partnerships and high traffic.
3) Try to game the system with spam islands at the risk of getting blacklisted.
That’s it. Anyone who tells you there’s more to it is lying.
Even additional knowledge about the crawling algorithm is temporary; they tweak it frequently. No amount of SEO can compensate for a page that isn’t particularly interesting to humans.