Fastest way for search engines to index a new site?

When launching a new website, what is the fastest way to have the searchengine spiders pick up the new site? Should the website be submitted to all searchengines available, or will they all find the site within a couple of days without submitting the url to seperate search engines?

When you have two URL's for two different websites, and they both lead to the same website, wouldn't it be more positive for the pagerank if you actually link the first site to the second, instead of auto forwarding it?

Thanks in advance!
PS - The meta tags on the site are fully optimized for the search engines..

The SE's will pick up the new domain if there's links pointing to it. How you get that done depends a lot on your budget. If you've got the money to spend, buy a couple of good PR links from related websites and the spiders will be there real quick. If you don't have the spare money (like most of us) you can try link requests or reciprocla linking with good and relevant sites. The biggest thing is to get the links out there. Submitting your URL to the SE's will give them a strating point, but submitted URL's usually don't get the same priority as ones found by robots crawling other sites.

This can be trouble depending on how you do it. If they are both info sites that have links back to one central site, that should be fine. If you have two URL's that resolve to the same site, watch out how that's done. The best way in this case is to have one domain 301 redirect to the main URL. This will keep the PR all at one site, keep the links all to one site, and will solve any issues that there could be with duplicate content between the to unique URL's.

This is a good idea, but these days the bigger SE's don't place much emphasis on the meta tags. They are mainly used for stripping the description that appreas on the pages. Still, it's always better to have the proper title, keywords, description and sometimes the follow/nofollow tags in the head for your visitors.

thanks for the awesome feedback Catacaustic, I appreciate your reply bigtime. I've made a google sitemap, made some 301 redirections and now it's all up to the spiders to come along