1. Think about promotion when you create your homepage! If you want to offer your homepage to as many people on the net as possible, do never use the newest technical gags and possibilities! If you do, only a small élite (where you belong to, that's fine!) can have a look on your site! Estimations say, that about 20 percent of the surfers on the net still dare to use text-only browsers! (Some blind people are within these 20 percent, they do not need graphics, the voice-system reads text!) And some 40 percent still use browsers that do not work with frames. May be you also cannot imagine, that java applets and active gags are unknown to nearly half of the browsers! And then there are all those (like me) who configure their most modern browsers not to load animations and sound files. It costs to much time, and we have to pay our phone bill! And still there are those with rather slow modems (it seems that there are still some 9600 modems working, unbelievable!) who like fast loading index pages! (Read some of the tips in the pages on the linkpage!)
So think about who should have access to your site and create it according their technical possibilities!
And think about a short address, see my example: If you type http://virtualchurch.home.ml.org, you'll arrive at http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/jacobean/34/. Quite a difference to memorize, remember and type, isn't it? I give you two links here, check them out, they're free and reliable!
Monolith : http://home.ml.org and http://www.come.to.

2. Finish your website! (including metatags and...). That means, the site is loaded on the server, tested and found working. Some search engines check all your pages and links with their robots, and if something does not work thats bad! And if you add your site before it is on the server and they check it out, and do not find it, you're gone! My Tip: Before you think about beginning with promotion, finish everything and test it online! Still some things work well on my computer but not on the server!

Think how you want to promote! There are basically three possibilities: a) Free automatic submit services. With them you don't have a lot to do yourself, but on the other side you cannot choose much about how your site is performed in linklists and search engines. Such services mostly want their banner on your index page. For private homepages they are a good possibility. But the suppliers of such services have to compromise, they have to choose a method that all linklists and search engines accept the submission. And those lists and machines have very different criterion. (how many keywords, how long may a description be etc.) So you have for sure in many places a worse performance than it could be - but you are for free listed in many places!
There are some "semi automatic services", where you fill one form and submit then by hand to the machines you choose. Here you need more time, but the result can be a bit better.
b) Do it yourself! That is by far the best way to control your performance yourself and make the maximum possible. But calculate a good 100 hours work - or more! You can begin with going to the Search Center and submit your site to all the engines, and if you're through, check the links out in my linklist and find hundreds of possibilities more. On my search engines page click the logos and you will arrive at their index page.
I would recommend this way of promotion to everybody, who opens a business or needs a lot of visitors seeing his page. It is a cheap way for a very good promotion, but if you calculate your work per hour, consider the next possibility!
c) Paid promotion. I do not say a lot here, there exist a lot of good (and also bad) offers for paid promotion. Here you must trust the one you pay, and therefore I recommend you work with people you know do a good work, or are recommended to you by reliable persons. I would be very careful for offers below 100 Dollars, a lot of time you can have the same for 10 dollars - or even free. Because these cheap offers are normally automatic submissions, some better, some ... Even in countries with small salaries (as India eg.) nobody will work 50 or more hours for 100 Dollars. And in less than 50 hours is an excellent promotion not possible. That's it for the paid services, my subject are the free ones. There is a simple rule: If you want to have a very good promotion, you will have to invest your valuable time or some other valuables! ( some amount of money!!!)
4. Go on in your work! Your decision how to promote is now made. Now do it, and then go on. It is recommendable not to change your filenames with every update, because some indexes and search engines spider all your pages - and they need some time to find out your changes, and so there are dead links instead of your sites. Do you like these 404 errors? Other people don't either. And there are indexes and machines, where you can submit different pages (infoseek eg.), do not forget to change there if something changes with your filenames, or add also new files!