What will help you most is reverse links. Contact other web sites that are relevant to yours in subject matter and get them to link to your site. When the worms and spiders crawl around the net, they will see your link and improve your ranking. The more links you have out there, the better your search engine rankings.

You can do a backward link search at google. For instance, to see who links to the Mudcat I would search for "link:http://www.mudcat.org". Mudcat has a lot because we've been around a long time (385 to the home page and 718 to the threads page). Allow at least 90 days for your efforts to reveal any success. Good luck.