Just finished a small and simple website for a small business. It would be nice if it came up in search engine searches and we've done what we can do to generate useful and relevant content, used keywords in headers etc – for whatever that's worth.

But do you still have to submit your website to search engines or do they all do it more or less automatically by this point? Any other easily-done-by-novices tips for increasing visibility in search engines?

I built a website in 1998 and had it in the top fifteen results for its subject on most search engines – not because it or I was much good but just because there wasn't any other information available about the subject on the whole internet!

google adwords

yeah, that was gonna be my next project (got a $50 voucher with the domain registration), but I wanted to knock off the free stuff first.

Follow the steps at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ to create an xml sitemap which you can submit to Google and various other search engines.