BC serves up HTML. If you want to increase your visibility you first have to optimize and target your content. Websites don't need a sitemap to rank.  What they do need is quality unique content that is beneficial to end users and is organized into good information architecture structures that allow the user and the search engine spider to understand the structure and context of your content.

That being said, you certainly should leverage page titles that match the content scope of the page and the keywords searchers use (keyword research) to discover or look for that content.  Your DOM structure is very important to communicate the weight of page content.  Just like a term paper requires structure, to get a good grade, so does your content. Learn HTML elements and when they should be used.  A page with no structure typically ranks poorly.

The meta description can help with conversion when that snippet of text is presented to end users in the SERP's (the SE's algorithm choice) but they alone will not help you rank a non- authoritative site / page with poor structure / content.

Ranking products or catalogs displayed via the e-commerce modules requires more effort since there is a lack of control currently over the presentation of catalogs. That should be addressed whenever BC releases Liquid template language for production.

There are plenty of great online resources your can find with simple searches. Study your competitors (the ones that rank) and focus on your content and structure. Good content is easy to share and people will. Share yours socially and build a presence.  It takes a lot of work to be in the top of the serps. But it is worth the investment.

@frank

Yes the keywords Meta tag has been acknowledged to no longer be a factor in search engine ranking algorithms. In the old days it helped but sites abused it. To stem the spam, the search engine ranking algorithms became much more sophisticated and stopped giving it weight. So at this point it would be considered a waste of time to add it to any html page.

In regards to whether you should be submitting your site to search engines, all of majors (Google, Bing/Yahoo) claim that is not necessary and I can confirm that to be true for my clients.  The search engine’s  continuously scan the web and other signals like browser plugins, browsers (Google chrome), social media, etc. to find new sites to crawl.  You can submit your site but it is just as fast to tweet a new site url, add a link to a Google + or Facebook page, or visit it with a Chrome browser.  You can also use Google's Webmaster tools to create a site profile and submit a sitemap to kick off a crawl from Google.

Sites can be in the Search Engine (SE) sandbox for a while after being indexed before showing up in the SERPS (search engine result pages) so don't sweat ranking in the beginning.  Socal is changing this however. The SE's can't afford to miss our on trending topics in social media  so the SE's  are sucking social media sites content firehoses and the top SE's have all added "almost real time social results", mixed into the result pages. 

It is important to understand that there are billions of web pages being constantly indexed and there is a constant ebb and flow of new sites, and old ones disappearing. Search engines rely more on quality signals these days versus a url or site submission. Get a link from an authoritative site relevant to your sites content. Then get more. Get the social conversation about your site and brand humming. These things will have a quicker and much greater impact than any thing else you can do in the beginning.

You can always monetise in the beginning and beyond with search engine marketing campaigns (PPC) to get transactions flowing versus waiting for "free" traffic via SEO.  Good luck.

@ LIAM "People like Jeff won't feed you Bad advise because they are just bad, you will hear and even get emails form so called SEO experts."

Lets discuss what you are referring to as bad advise and base it on something other than your personal cojecture.

For example:  Source - Google Webmaster Tools Help - RE: Meta Description -

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624

"The description attribute within the <meta> tag is a good way to provide a concise, human-readable summary of each page’s content. Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content. Accurate meta descriptions can help improve your clickthrough; here are some guidelines for properly using the meta description."

My client's experience is that Google perfers our written meta descriptions most of the time versus its algorythm and as a result they get better clickthrought rates than similar websites.