To get more homepage hits you need to carefully choose keywords and make a sentence or two to describe it (clear and accurate). Then you can fill out a form at yahoo where you can choose in which area you wanna be listed (e.g. Personal homepages) and also the keywords and site description (short) that you prepared.
Things that search engines look for:

also, if your homepage is hosted by some university, then your site is more likely to get hits the more content you have because webcrawlers frequently index the entire site including the normal text that is on your webpage (not only what's in the <title> tag or keywords that you gave in when u registered at yahoo). probably, search engines automatically index all sites with edu domain

but remember: after you've registered your site in yahoo, and put in the right keyword in your title tags for webcrawlers, it still take a while (several weeks/months) for them to find it