The world of
SEO is no simple one, Google have just changed the way they do some of there rankings, only a few weeks back. As said above, the best way to get in the Engines is to get a good link from a good website. I have had a website for four years, and by placing a link to my new site on it a few months back i got into the search engines within days. The biggest trick is to make the website look as relevent as possible without going over the top, if you go too far, they will ban you or give you a low rank as it will look like spam.
Having good links inbound is not the only trick, there are many many tricks and optimizations you can do. Also too many links to quick pointing to your website sets the alarms off with google and will not help the website. Google look for regular updated content, and no repetitions or duplicate content. They like to see a slow progression with websites that link into yours, this all takes time, around 4-6 months to get a proper job done.
Adwords are good, but this is paid (obvious). If you have a good optimized site you will get free visitors that can then be topped up with paid ones, rather than relying on paid visitors from the off.
SEO for dummies is a great book, teaches the basics of
SEO, but go on the net and do some further research, especially with Google as they change things fairly regular.
Also using some good stats scripts are good, you can see what visitors are typing in the engines to get to your site, you can then optimize for these keywords.