I can tell you how I promoted my site with very little effort. I made the site nice to search engines (follow advice by Sandeep) and then submitted it to Google:
http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl[
^].
Apparently, Google did the rest. After a short period of time a search strings I wanted be easily found were putting a reference to my site in a first line of search result, not just by Google but pretty much by all search engines.
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