how do I make my page appear in web search results?

Annotation by strick :

Not so much Linking To Sites, as Being Linked From Sites. From Important Sites. So linking from a FQA is good -- but then link to FQAs (from yet other sites) so we get a good score also, which helps you, too.

This Scientific American article describes how the algorithm works in Google:

Summary: Every day the World Wide Web grows by roughly a million electronic pages, adding to the hundreds of millions already on-line. By analyzing these interconnections, our system automatically locates two types of pages: authorities and hubs. At its most basic level, a search engine maintains a list, for every word, of all known Web pages containing that word.