First get your site listed in the dmoz directory (
www.dmoz.org). It fuels (or used to, as of last year) googles directory.
Next, Google ignores meta tags. The keywords you want indexed should be in your page title. e.g. change your title from "Welcome to Joe's site" to "Joe's site - all about widgets and gadgets" or whatever your site is about.
The other thing that is necessary is to have inbound links. Find other related websites and offer to link trade. The more links to your site, the higher ranking you will get and the more often the googlebots will crawl and index your site.
If you have the google toolbar installed, you can see the page rank of different websites. Basically the higher the ranking of the websites that link to you, the higher your own ranking in google will be.