If this happens to you, simply re-submit the next day, preferably early in the day before others on the domain have a chance to submit theirs. It appears that when pages are approximately equal in relevancy, AltaVista will list the older pages first. This is not always true, which led me to email them asking whether or not it was the case. The email pooh-poohs this idea, but many experts believe it to be so. If you use a hosting service which also hosts spammers and pornographers, you could be penalized or even excluded because the underlying IP address for that service is the same for all the virtual domains it includes.
Search terms appear frequently in the document The queried words are found early in the document.
The queried words are close to one another in the document. Think like the people you want to visit your site. Decide what words those people would likely use when searching for a site like yours on a search engine. Use meta tags for description and keywords. Use desired keywords in the body of your pages.