Lots of hype is done about there being secret methods and trick to good rankings. Blasting your site to every search engine there is isn't going to get you more visitors. The trick to getting more people is increasing your rankings for particular keywords on the main search engines like google, msn, and yahoo. Note: I'll be using google in this example, but the same principles apply to the other search engines.
Google takes 2 or 3 months to do it's full crawl of all 8 billion pages. Crawling means google is wandering through the site and its linked sites, so the more your site is linked by other sites, the more frequently it will pass through your site. If you just use their standard submit page, it can take the full 3 months. Getting good links in related pages will help you getting indexed much faster.
If you're selling widgets, and you're on page 5000 for the keyword, you won't be selling much widgets. To increase in your ranking, you must have people link to your page with the keyword "widgets". The more people to do this, the higher your ranking for that particular word.
Google has this thing called "page rank", the more people linking you, the higher it gives your ranking, the more pages it crawls. 200 crummy tripod sites will not give you a high ranking. Your ranking is also determined by the ranking of the pages that link to you, because google thinks links are like votes. People who link you, like your page, and if important pages link you, you must have relevant or specially important content.
EliteSkills.com is a poetry site, but when people link it they think it as Elite Skills rather than Poetry, so it doesn't get a higher ranking for the important keyword "poetry". It's on page 8 for poetry, while on page 2 for the unrelated keyword "elite". While search engines give little to no points for having the keyword in your domain, people are much more likely to link you with keyword rich text if you do.
You're not going to be number 1 for the keyword "shopping". Sorry, and your probably not going to be number 1 for any other common word or product, especially starting out. Target general or specialty selections in the genre. Find other sites like yours and try to distinguish yourself. If you can't find a way to be unique, and your competition is strong, there's no hope for you in the future. Adding META tags can help your ranking a little for general keywords, but it may take a lot of time to establish yourself as one of the major competitors since the biggest sites have a far easier time getting people to link them. Remember, there's 8 billion pages. It takes a bit of time and thought to establish yourself.
A good way to make inward links is to join sites like yahoo directory and DMOZ in a relevant category. Another way is simply to email related sites saying you'd like to interlink with them. Be sure you have unique content and send emails to evenly matched pages, otherwise not only will you get rejected but in the future they'll be less likely to allow an interlink.
If your a business, it may be worth it to throw some money at the paid directories and portals. Get the google toolbar. Find sites with related content and if their page is at least 6 or 7 enquire about text link advertising paid monthly. Now this can be a bit expensive but your site will be in the results really fast. You pagerank however, will still take a good bit of time for
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Thank you, depressing info but thanks for telling me.