I'm trying to get a site up for a friend and want it to be able to be found by search engines. How do I even begin to do that?

Search is really a wild beast. Basically SEO is about giving the search engines the right information off your site. Search engines are robots and cannot interpret your site you need to prepare your site in a manner that tells the search engines what your pages are about. The factors go much like they would in a written report. Title tells people what the whole page is about. Headers tell about a section and should be similar in topic to the Title. Using Strong tags emphasize the important of a term or phrase. So using the equivalent of these in coding on your site will help to tell the engines what it is your site is about. These are a few of the basic things you want to so initially. Outside of that you want to focus on links, both internal and external. You should link to things in your site using helpful words. If you have a page about car door replacements then you should use that phrase in the link text and not the word "link" or "here"Links are in essence online recommendations. You need to use the term or phrase of what it is that you are actually recommending. Try to get some solid links from other sites and directories. Use common sense and stay related to your industry and avoid obviously cheap and rip off sites. That is vague but use common sense. All this is basic for helping you have what i like to call a page focus and should be individually redone for each page on the site. Try to have as few focuses per page to not dilute your value for that focus. The problem with on page factors is that they work fine as long as you have no real competition and as long as you hit no road blocks. There are numerous other factors and tips you can do to help increase your focus and make your site look like an authority source to search engines. In the end you will probably need to look at some professional help to be able to compete and get over the larger hurdles but what i have detailed here can be a great start and at least get you to a starting point. I will tell you there are two golden tickets to ranking. Old domains and quality links. Hope this helped and thanks for choosing my answer as the best.