Depending on who you ask, you'll get a ton of different answers to this question.

Here's my two cents:
1) Find sites that have similar themes to them, and ask to swap links. Generally site owners do this to increase the traffic to their own site.
2) Publicize your site online, and in person. My personal favorite promotion is bumper stickers. You can order them fairly cheap, and people always notice them. (I have one for one of my sites on my car, and people comment on it all the time.)
3) Keep your content fresh and interesting. If people see that your site never changes, they'll be less likely to return, or tell your friends about it.
4) If you have the budget for it, give something away on the site periodically. I know from first hand experience, months where we give something away, our traffic skyrockets.

In the end, it's all about how good your site is, as to whether or not people are going to want to visit. Keep your site fresh, entertaining, and well designed.

In today's day and age, there's no clear cut right or wrong answer to this.

Some people say major search engines only look at META tags, while others say that META tags don't matter these days.

Personally, I think it's combination of the two. Having good META tags, with good keywords, in addition to having good content on your site, helps.

Also, having a clean, clear page title, and URL helps a lot too. Naming your pages as "mypageabouthtml.html" would be better to get listed than "page3.html", as search engines to look at this as an important feature.

The best advice I have, is to keep trying. Every site, and every search engine is different. While your site may do well on MSN search, it may do poorly in Google. Keep trying different things, and keep your content consistently themed.

1.) In the HEAD section of your HTML file, type <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="
2.) Type a few words that concisely describe the topic of your page. Separate each word with a comma AND a space.
3.) Type "> to complete the META tag.
Your finished tag should look like this:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="baseball, sports, games"> (replacing baseball, sports, games with words relevant to your website)

Some general hints: Use a combination of general and unique words to describe the content of your page. Even misspelling certain words may help visitors find your page. Your goal here is to match the things a possible visitor might type into the search engine.

Note: the majority of search engines limit your "keywords" to 200 characters. Anything more than 200 (as I often see) can get you disqualified, and actually ruin your ranking.

Yes, absolutely.

The majority of search engines have built in "cheat detectors", for lack of a better term.

If you submit your site too many times, or create false "links in", duplicate your content on another site, or any one of various other things could get your site disqualified from being listed in the top spots.

The best thing to do, is ask the search engine company in question what their policies are.

If you ask that company, yes, I'm sure they'll give you 300,000 reasons why you should fork over a couple hundred dollars.

If you ask me, no, absolutely not. Why? Well, I'm glad you asked, here's my logic:

If five different companies sell tires, and want to be listed as number 1, when someone searchs for tires, there's a problem.

Say all five of those companies pay a "search engine optimization" company to get them "guaranteed listings as number 1", as these companies often claim. Who wins? If they're all guaranteed to be number 1, how is that possible if there's 5 of them?

Do I think it will help your ranking, by paying them? No. I've built numerous sites that rank extremely well on certain keywords, without paying a single person, or even submitting the sites to search engines. It's all in the content, and keywords on your site.