Search engine optimisation and promotion

A good place to start for the novice: http://selfpromotion.com/

There are two main aspects to getting your website ranking in search engines:
Optimising the site to enable SE's to easily find and rank the content.
Actively submitting the site to SE's, directories, indexes and other sites that create incoming links to your site.

The factors that affect ranking in SE's are numerous and the algorithms used by each is complex and constantly changing. A few main key points should ensure that no matter what changes are adopted by the SE's a site should perform well across the board.

• Find out which are the most used keywords related to your business:
  http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion
• Create a list of keywords and keyphrases based on this information, incorporating plurals and alternative spellings. Write original, engaging content focusing on two to three key phases per page. These should be repeated up to approx 4 times. Page content should be 250-500 words.
  http://www.seorank.com/seo-copywriting-article.htm
• Add page title, meta description and keywords based on the content of the page
• Ensure menu system is spiderable
• Use keyphrases in h1 tags
• Avoid content, and menu systems built in Flash
• Avoid producing text as images
• Use image alt text on all images
• Use tableless, semantically correct pages styled by CSS
• Add anchor text links to other relevant pages from within page content
• Include a site map
• Submit url to all general and industry specific directories and indexes with links back to the site
• Submit to major search engines
• Start a link building campaign with relevant sites
• Write regular press releases and submit to online press release distribution services with links back to relevant pages of the site
• Get links from all industry specific governing bodies, affiliates, partners etc.
• Oh, and one more thing... ...more links! (from relevant, high ranking sites)