This is such an interesting thread. I didn't wanted to be left out so im gonna jump in as well
As I'm building a site, actually two sites, one is totally content based (php tutorials) and the other is service based (free image hosting), at some point i would need to figure out the marketing part of it.
I too once consider listing (one of old project which no longer exsists) at yahoo directories but with a fee of $299, i backed off. I did submit them to free unknown directories but they didn’t generate any traffic and didn't increase my pageranks.
i'm really lost in terms of getting backlinks and traffic. I just don't know what are the poeple with successful sites do to get their pagerank up and get so many backlinks. Where do they put their links? random Blogs? random forums? Directories? but then which ones? DMOZ seems to be so strict on who are they going to include. I havn't had any luck with them. Sites like mayspace? Digg? Stumbleupon?
As a starter (with no back links) where can i go to get some initial traffic from? I have no problem with google/yahoo to index my webpage but building backlinks and getting traffic is what drove me crazy and i end up shutting my website (community based deal site). I think sticcit is going to end up like that too.
One thing i did notice with my phpgeeklog blog site (which only has one article up yet) is that people started linking to it themselves. I submitted my site in digg.com (in their programming section) and with in a week i had people linking to my tutorial. The reason i think people did that was because it provided something useful for the people in terms of value as oppose to my community based sites. So, getting people recognizing something which is useful is not hard and it will pickup popularity by itself. But getting people to use something which might not have something in value is hard and im having doubts if my image hosting project will end up in trash bin as well. But im hopeful about this one because it give people a service that they can use for free.
So coming back to the thread and the real question which is what you need to get rank high on google? I would say start from the basics. First Make sure your site doesn't have nay broken links. As Lisa pointed out, get meta tags in there on ever page. Find out the best/high traffic keywords for your niche. Make sure you submit your links to your articles to community based sites like digg.com. With google it all depends on backlinks. There are thousands of way you can build those and i don't know all of them which is part of the whole mystery