Hello,
I am a webmaster to a site and managed to increase the site's popularity. It is not hard, but requires some efforts.
The websites have a rank on every search engine,one of most important is that one gave by google. This page rank is strongly related with popularity, number of unique visitors, the backlinks that site have, the quality of content and structure.
The backlinks are links to your site from other sites; these sites are usually directories, or link partners. To assure your website will have more backlinks on google you should follow some steps and after a while you will see that your link popularity will grow up.
First of all you should exactly know what is your website about, determine the principal keywords, use them on page's title and description.
A second step would be to initiate a link exchange program with relevant sites.
Another stage is to write some articles on blogs, or forums with a signature to your site. Be careful if you have too much links on blogs or forums you might be banned, and your site will get into a downward turn.
I hope this simple rules guide you and get your site on first pages on search engines.

Another way to get a backlink is to create an article about a site and ask a link to your site, but it is very important to be related, with related meta-description.

I think it's more easy to get good traffic from Google Search Engine than MSN and Yahoo. But this isn't a reason of worry because most people search on Google rather than MSN and Yahoo.
Anyway, there are a few ways to raise traffic to your site. First of all, i advice you to promote your site; write an article or a blog, join in forums, make link exchange... anything to get your web site spidered.