I want to target a keyword and list my site at the top for that particular keyword. Can someone tell me how to do that?
research your particular keyword, i suggest use the google adword:keyword tool and then start promoting your site with your chosen keyword, and then a lot of patience.
Firstly choose a good keyword that suits your site and have less competition.You can use tool http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html for keyword analysis.After deciding the keyword start working off page optimization like article submission,directory,link exchange,social site submission,forum posting and blog comment. In all these thing target your keywords as an anchor text.Try to take link as do fallow. Hope this will help you.
Before you do anything to market your website, I highly suggest you read as much as you can find about seo. If you jump into seo without knowledge, your efforts could end up hurting your rankings. Make sure you know every little thing that the search engines could penalize you for. Here are some topics that you'll want to read up about: 1) keyword research...only worth doing seo if you know which keywords will get you traffic 2) on page site optimization 3) link building...there are various strategies to build links for your website. Links are what fuels rankings. So this will become your most time intensive part of seo.