Search Engines: like Google, Yahoo and MSN

Submission and "Meta Submission" Services
My honest opinion: 99% of the submission services are crap, or even dangerous. If a submission service offers to submit your page to X search engines for free (also known as "Meta Submission"), chances are, they are just after your email address or they are looking for new pages for their Spam bots to harvest from. IF they even make an effort to really submit your URL to a search engine, it is an automated script that runs, and the best case scenario is, that the search engine will drop the submission from that service as "Spam". Worst case: Your page will be black listed with that search engine, and the odds of your page ever getting a good listing there are close to zero.
If you still can't resist using one of these "free submission services", then at least don't use your primary email address when you make your entry.
Just for the fun of it (or if you don't believe me) register a new email address with a free service (such as yahoo or hotmail), and use this email, when you make your submission: The only thing you'll get out of it is massive amounts of spam on this account from this day forward.
The bad news is: There is no way around manual work, when you want to get listed.
The good news: You have to submit your page to less search engines than you think, and that is for two main reasons:

1) Crawlers
All of the major search engines have so called "crawlers" these days. A crawler is a piece of software that is programmed to constantly surf the web. It is following all links it comes across. When it visits new websites, it checks its own database to see if the site is listed already. If the site is listed, it makes note of any changes and calculates a search engine ranking for the site. If the site has not been previously listed, the crawler will record important information (Topics, key words, meta-tags…), add the website to the database, and assign a ranking to it.
In other words: If a crawler finds your page linked from another page that is already known, it will index your page all by itself. Because of that it is much more important to get people to link to you, than manually submitting your page to hundreds of search engines.

2) Databases like the "Open Directory Project" (http://dmoz.org)
Today search engines are not as independent as you might think. With billions and billions of web pages to index even the big guys realized, that it is good to work together.
There are a few databases, which feed into search engines. One of them is the "Open Directory Project", which feeds into Google, Yahoo and a number of other big and small search engines. This is your "foot in the door" to the big guys: If your page gets listed in the "Open Directory Project" for example, it will be submitted as "trusted data", i.e. it will not be considered spam by a no-name submission service.
The particular advantage of the "Open Directory Project" is, that it is based on human editors, who "own" and watch over a category. And this is where it really pays off to invest some time to read, how to submit your link the right way and to think of good keywords and a short description for your page before your submit it.

 

You will most likely be told that it will take some time until you get listed in the search engines, but in my own experience it works pretty fast if you do it the right way. An educated guess I can offer: One quality submission will be more effective than 100 bulk submissions. With the right key words and a few moderate submissions I managed to get a new page on page one in Google in less than a month, using only the (external) help of links from other pages that were already listed on a good Google position. However, the best strategic submissions are not doing you any good if you don't make the content of your page easily digestible for search engines. If you have your page programmed by somebody else, this person should be aware of the "do's" and "don'ts". If you make the page yourself, pay good attention to these tips: they have a huge influence on the future listings (and with that the future) of your page.