First Steps

You should start by adding your site to search engines manually instead of waiting for them to look for you. The site below will allow you to add your site to many search engines at one time:

http://www.addme.com/

For CMS users (Joomla, Wordpress, etc), use "search engine friendly" (SEF) URLs. These reformat the URLs of your website so they are understandable by search engines. For example, below is how a CMS may format your URL: http://yourdomain.com/index.php?page=45&option=something

A Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URL would look like this: http://yourdomain.com/45/something

These are easier for search engines to read, making it easier for them to index your site. Most CMS's will have a SEF extension or plugin that can do this for you.

Next Steps

After following the SEO basics, you can help your site further by tweaking it a little more. Below are the most common things to do next.

1. Create a sitemap! Sitemaps are mainly used by Yahoo and Google to index your site:
2. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40318 
3. If you are using a CMS, your CMS may have a third-party sitemap extension.
4. Use meta tags:http://www.highrankings.com/metakeyword