Promoting your small business website in the search engines can be a daunting task. Use of free submissions and link popularity is a good starting point for your website promotion campaign.

Start with the basis of good search engine and directory listings. Make sure you read and follow each search engine and directory's rules for submissions. Before making submissions, always verify that all your website links and pages work, with no pages "under construction".
Search Engines and Directories: Begin with the Open Directory Project. ODP is free and provides secondary search results to many other search engines. (Secondary search results are search results that come up after the primary search results of a search engine are shown.)

It is preferable to secure a listing in ODP before submitting your website to Yahoo!, but it often takes time to become listed in ODP and may not be possible. If you can afford a yearly $299.00 subscription to submit to Yahoo!, do so. If you are a non- commercial website, you may be able to submit your website for free. You will find the rules about free submissions when you click on the "suggest a site" link at the bottom of your chosen category page.

Google is the top search engine and one you want to be listed in. Google provides secondary search results to other search engines and directories.
If you do B2B (business-to-business) with other companies, Business.com is a reasonable $99.00 subscription per year and gives you the opportunity to list not only your home page, but four other pages from your website.

Inktomi is a good choice for a reasonably priced link (yearly fee of $39.00 for first page, $25.00 per page 2-1000 for additional pages) and will get you into secondary search results for the MSN search engine. Position Technologies has a good submission program available for Inktomi.

Zeal.com listings are part of the LookSmart directory, which provides primary search listings for MSN. You must sign-up to become a Zeal editor and pass a test before being able to add your non-commercial submissions to Zeal. Articles and tutorials are good choices to use when submitting non-commercial information from your website to Zeal.com.

Many of the major search engines still include a free submission section for their listings. Paid Inclusion and PPC (pay-per-click) are always the faster choices, but if your budget is limited you may want to consider submitting and waiting the 6-8 weeks (or more) it often takes to see your listings show up.
Major search engines providing free submissions include: Google, Alta Vista, and AlltheWeb.
Secondary search engines you can submit to for free include Gigablast and ScrubtheWeb.. One smaller directory is JoeArt.
For link popularity, searching in Google is a quick way to find suitable websites to request links from or submit to.

The Google Toolbar shows you the approximate link popularity of other websites, as well as giving you choices such as checking backlinks, similar pages, a cached snapshot of the page and more when you right-click on the web page. The Overture suggestion tool is a free way to check how popular your keyword phrases are in comparison to the monthly results of Overture.
MarketLeap measures your link popularity, and that of three of your competitors. The report is free and gives you a benchmark showing where your popularity lies online vs. your competitors.

Lastly, if you want to "do it yourself", the top places are Search Engine Watch and Webmaster World. Search Engine Watch and Webmaster World's sister site, Search Engine World, both have free newsletters full of information to help you promote your website.