No worries, glad to help.
Quick crash course in Google though. Usually your site is crawled first (ie Googlebot comes along and grabs a page from your site), then it gets indexed (ie, the page is inserted into a massive database of other pages).
But how you rank for a search term depends on the quality of the page, how relevant it is, how many people link to you, how trustworthy you are etc. Pages are pulled out of the database and ordered accordingly to create the results page.
In your other case, you'd blocked search engines from finding out what was on your site. So even though Google might've found links to your site elsewhere on the web, since they couldn't crawl it to find out what was on the page then you didn't really stand much chance of ranking well.
Without seeing a site, its difficult to say for definite, but if you build a good page with quality stuff on it, get some decent links to your site, don't try to do anything dodgy (hidden text etc), then usually the good rankings will follow. Patience is usually the key.