Patience Goes a Long Way
Whenever you deal with search engines waiting becomes the main issue. Google can take anything up to 2 months to first visit your site. It can take even longer to rank any of the pages. So from the outset you have to be patient with the search engines.
If you want a quick fix you will have to pay for sponsored links. I will be adding a section on this soon.
For those of you who have been patient, the good news is things tend to get better and better. Many of the sites we have submitted to Google have generally doubled in popularity once on Google. Then tend to double again every month as Google rescans and re-indexes them. Google seems to like fresh content so the more you keep on top of your site and the more you update it the more your statistics seem to grow. We generally find your visits per day tends to stop rising much beyond the number of pages you have. A 250 page site seems to stop rising when it get 250 visits a day ( I am sure this observation is not always true ).
One of our clients sites started on around 8 visits a day they now receive up to 300 visits a day from around the world. Simple HTML combined with one of ourcontent management systems has allowed them to increase the size of their site adding fresh content in a way that Google likes.