Here is a good reference to follow while looking for ways to promote your site.

Website Owners Checklist

• Seek out quality, on-topic sites using search engine
• Use a 'traffic exchange' program
• Put website URL on all printed materials
• Multiple domain names covering common variations of business name and type of service or product the business sells
• Add URL to email, newsgroup and forum signatures
• Put URL on business uniforms
• Give promotional items with the website URL
• Put URL in all business press releases
• Put URL on company vehicles
• Regularly add good content to a website
• Submit written reviews of your website to print media such as magazines
• Include URL in any classified advertising
• Use the link as your signature in related forums
• Add URL to plug boards
• Add URL to pixel sites
• Add URL to blog posts
• Add URL to forum posts
• Add URL to web directories
• Use free search engine submission services
• Use online website promotion and research tools
• When on a chat system send URL messages
• Send emails about your website

How web sites are submitted

There are two basic methods still in use today that would allow a webmaster to submit their site to a search engine. They can either submit just one web page at a time, or they can submit their entire site at one time with a sitemap. However, all that a webmaster really needs to do is to submit just the home page of a web site. With just the home page, most search engines are able to crawl a site, provided that it is well designed.

Web sites desire to be listed in popular search engines because that is how most people access web sites. People like to search for information on the web at what is known as a search engine. Sites that appear on the first page of a search are said to be in the top 10. Clicking on a hyperlink causes the found web page to appear in the searchers web browser.

Thus, webmasters often highly desire that their sites appear in the top 10 in a search engine search. This is because searchers are not very likely to look over more than one page of search results, known as a SERPs.

In order to obtain good placement on search results in the various engines, webmasters must optimize their web pages. The process is called search engine optimization. Many variables come into play, such as the placement and density of desirable keywords, the hierarchy structure of web pages employed in a web site (i.e., How many clicks from the home page are required to access a particular web page?) , and the number of web pages that link to a given web page. The Google search engine also uses a concept called page rank.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance ( Source: http://www.google.com/technology/)

 

Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps was introduced in June 2005 so web developers could publish lists of links from across their sites. The sitemap is used to make the search engine aware of the site and the pages on the site.

As of 2007 XML sitemaps are supported by Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN. The location of the Sitemap can be specified using a robots.txt file to help search engines find the Sitemaps.

Search engine submission services no longer necessary

By 2004, search engine submission services became unnecessary because the major search engines, "the big four", Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live and Ask.com, already had the ability to automatically discover new webpages by crawling links from other sites. Professional search engine optimizers, such as Jill Whalen, have stated that search engine submission is unnecessary. In fact, automated search engine submission may violate the search engines' terms of service, creating the potential for a site using such a service to be banned.[2] In addition, the remaining search engine submission services have been seen trying out alternate business models, leading to web server attacks on the submitted domain names.
The exception to this rule occurs when a new site under a new domain name wishes to be indexed. As inbound links have not yet been established, search engines have no way to automatically discover the new site. In this case search engine submission is necessary.

Search Engine Submission Software is very useful for Global Internet Marketing

Many once-small search engines in China and India are getting more and more popular after 2007. For example: Baidu.com(Nasdaq:BIDU) was not well known at the beginning. It is now the most popular search engine in China, while Google is in second place. Without submitting to these search engines via search engine submission software, you may miss millions of visitors who might come to your website via these search engines. The second benefit is that, some search engine submission software not only submit your web site to search engines, but also add links to your web site from their own link pages submitted. This is very helpful in increasing your website's ranking, because external links are one of the most important factors to a web site's ranking.1