There are plenty of people in the Business/Services section of this site who will submit your sites for you.
Use the free version of Wordtracker for keyword research and get yourself the get edu backlinks which are the most powerful backlinks. Also check out building hubpages at places like Squidoo and Hubpages.com. I dedicated an entire thread to this: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1507424 All free tools at your disposal. Good Luck!
My best tool for seo is senuke. Really depends what sort of level you are at and how much you want to earn but senuke can be for everyone if you know how to use it and actually use it! Tom Brite