I would say if you want everything secure then you need to start with a firewall. You will want to drop all incoming connections that are not destined for port 80 (http) or if you want port 443 (https). After your firewall is all setup, you should run nmap on your machine and see what ports are open to the outside world.
After that comes the apache setup. Not sure if you have done any of this before so sorry if I make it too simple

You should su to root and then cd /etc/rc.d. in this directory you will see a bunch of files that start with rc.<service>. You will find one that is rc.httpd. To make it executable you will want to chmod +x rc.httpd. Then you should ./rc.http start. If this gives you any errors, please post them and I can help you out. I know that after updating with swaret, I needed to make some changes to my /etc/apache/httpd.conf file. You will also want to uncomment the lines at the bottom of the httpd.conf file that read:
Include /etc/apache/mod_ssl.conf
and
Include /etc/apache/mod_php.conf
These will include the modules so you can run ssl support and php. Let me know if you have any problems or if I didnt answer the correct question
