I have my own website but have never been able to place top 10 in the search engines. I have read about SEO and even tried to optimize to achieve better positioning without any results.
Can anyone point me to the right direction? I really don't know what I am doing wrong. I am not a professional developer, I am self taught, but have been writing html for years.

Any help will be greatly appreciated..

First optimise your pages.

Keywords you want to rank for in title and on your pages.

Then get links from other sites with your keywords in the anchor text.

Check forums.digitalpoint.com it will tell you all you need to know.