New website owners are put in a tight corner when it comes to promoting their new website. Modern search engines usually place higher rankings on those sites that have more sites linking to them, that is, those with more inbound links.
How then, is it that a new website will get anyone linking to it, when no one knows that it even exists since it is at the bottom of a search engine result page? The is the heart of the chicken and egg dilemma that new webmasters are faced with.
We always hear that "content is king" and that you should write content for your users and not for search engines and that your rankings will (magically) build up over time. That is true, but only in a few scenarios. If you are to show up in search engine result pages as a new website, you cannot have the same content as every other site which already has thousands of backlinks.
The key is to have unique content. Most times you will not have as much money to spend on advertising (or other promotions) as the big boys. So you cannot compete with them for the same content. Any new website owner should endeavour to have as much unique content on their pages as possible. If your content is so unique that only 9 other sites have similar content, you are well poised to appear on the first page of a 10 results per page search query.
Exact matches to search queries are usually given higher priorities in the SERPs (search engine result pages). Think about it this way: the world is too big for at least one other person not to have the same line of thinking as you. Write a unique article, and you might just be surprised how many people were looking for an article like that or along the same lines.
No matter how new your site is, if you have around 20 pages of fairly unique content, you will be surprised that search engines actually land visitors to your site. Server log analyzers, such as Awstats, sometimes surprise you when they show you that a particular query in a search engine landed a visitor to your site.
When the visitor arrives to the one in the million page that they were looking for all day, they are more likely to link back to you or to promote your site in some other way.
What happens after that is based on how much work you have put into your site. The person will probably want to have a look around. What is good is if there is a block right in front of the user showing him or her links to some of your other popular or recent content. If they were satisfied with the article that landed them there, they should have no problem with looking around your site some more.
Above all, you should ensure that your site is indeed written for the user, as it is the user who determines if you will get a backlink from them or not; the same backlink that you require to move up the next couple ranks in the search engine result page jungle.