what would make my website popular with search engines?

[Jake]

Reminds me of banner ad sites that worked in the very early days when people would visit anything they could find.

One of Google's site quality rating factors is the percentage of a page content that is advertisements, that content excludes menus, headers, footers. Anything approaching 50% of the page content are being ads is considered spam.

Some store sites pay services to send out robots to insert low grade spam backlinks on a bunch iof sites, this can raise the page rank and search ranking at least in the short term, but with Google's increasing attention to quality, those links will probably be detrimental in the long run.

To rank on the merits of the site you would have to add quality original content, like a few 500 word articles for each of the topics your top menu shows. The words in the articles will tend to help getting more search matches. That original content and some decent quality manually generated backlinks may get you into search results for some relatively obscure low comoetition phrases.