Promoting your site has a lot to do with off page search engine optimization strategies. You’re aiming to develop backlinks to your website. By doing this you will create a sense of professionalism and it will also rank you higher in your search engines meaning what guys? More traffic!

1. Submit your website! Why? So you can get traffic through search engines!
You will not automatically be listed on a search engine when you have submitted it. What submitting a website does, it puts it in a list to be crawled. Your website will be placed on the search engine quicker; if more listed sites have backlinks to your website. This is because listed sites constantly get crawled and when crawling, they see your website, and therefore they get linked.
These are the three biggest search engines:

• http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
• http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
• http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

2. Verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools and submit a sitemap
Next step is to do what the title says! Follow the instructions through the links.
Sitemap –
 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184
Webmaster Tools –
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34592&hl=en

3. Not a business? Doesn't matter! Submit yorself to Google Business Center!
It’s free so there’s no question whether you should do this or not. If a person is searching site maps, your website/business can appear. Do this by going here;
https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?continue=http%3A%2F%2Fmaps.google.com%2Flocal%2Fadd%2FbusinessCenter%3Fgl%3DUS%26hl%3Den-US&service=lbc&hl=en-US&gl=US

4. Link exchange!!!!!
Why? Well same thing as when trying to obtain backlinks. Backlinks rank you higher on search engines, therefore increasing your traffic and the same thing happens when you link exchange. Keep in mind that search engines prefer if the link is not a reciprocal, but it is hard to create non reciprocal links when starting off.