Your niche is competitive... Its not easy to rank for it.
Forget about ranking and try to get traffic from different sources like blogging, forum posting, content distribution etc.
Or try to target some less competitive and long tail keywords in the niche.
As far indexing is concerned, here are some tips,
- Submit your Sitemap to the search engine
- Submit you RSS feeds
- Submit your website to social bookmarking website
- Get backlinks from website which frequently get crawled
- Use fetch as Googlebot tool