Edgar:
Pay attention to what Jeff says, I was going to write something along those lines too. Good content and links from other legitimate sites is what does it.
For Google, there are no short-cuts, you have to wait, by definition, they don't list domains right away to avoid benefiting the domain wranglers. Submit your site once and let it be.
The other engines may list you sooner but again, no guarantee. Most engines have a tool to submit your domain, use them, once.
At this point I don't know how much it matters but in the sites I want listed I include a robots.txt just in case with the content below:
# Allow spiders to crawl and index everything.
User-Agent: *
Allow: /
With these recommendations, and nothing else special, my sites do fairly well.
Carlos