Also, make sure your home page is not javascript or made up soley of images as Google etc won't pick it up.
Make sure there's plenty of relevant text on the home page and that the meta tag words are also incorporated in the visible text. This tells the Bot that the tags are relevant to the page.
Links from other sites are good but only if the sites linking to you are of a high ranking with Google. Google ranks each web page and better quality links to your page will give you a better rank yourself i.e a link from say the BBC site to yours is worth a lot more than a link from Joe Blogg's site about his family. Don't be tempted to get your website listed on a links page (a site that has purely links to other sites), Google will see through this and it will go against you.