Manual vs. Automatic Submission
There are basically three ways to go about promoting your website URL with search engines. Manual Website Promotion Automatic Website Promotion Custom Website Promotion

Search Engine Submission
(website) this is a superb portal page with links to over 50 automatic search engine submission sites, with complete descriptions of each. Use this link to plan your auto-submission of your URL to maximize effectiveness and time.

General Search Engines and Indexes
Promotion center for indexes, geographically limited search engines and
genre specific tools.

Search Engine Watch
Excellent summary site of how submitting should be done.

Siteowner.com
Free tools. Instantly submit your link to the 6 major search engines (Excite, Lycos, Infoseek, Hotbot, Altavista, Webcrawler) This is a large site, with many other tools worth mentioning, like sample privacy statements, spell checker, adding banners, counters, check your ranking, etc.

Search Engine No-No's
Search engines now use complex algorithms which will penalize your website (possibly even banning it) for using spamming techniques, such as using the same or similar colors for your text and background, tiny text, excessive keyword repetition, and meta tag redirection.

Each search engine is different. Each has certain tweaks and tips for how they catalog and search sites. See the links below for specific information on them

Tips for Excite
The best way to get into Lycos is to submit your site to Lycos as usual AND submit to the Open Directory Project that Lycos and many other engines use as a source of results on certain searches.

Tips for submitting to Infoseek
Make sure that you wait at least 30 minutes in between each submission For best results, submit these pages manually using the search engine's submission page. In fact, on some engines you may get tagged for spam review or get extra submitted pages ranked lower if you submit anything other than the home and hallway pages.

Tips for Hotbot & Altavista
Hotbot is still mysteriously dropping pages off their index for no apparent reason. Here is a tip from http://www.searchengine-news.com. Their newsletter said that the fastest way to get indexed by Hotbot at the moment is to submit to Canada.com

Tips DirectHit, LookSmart and Open Directory
Several search engines such as HotBot and Lycos use DirectHit and the Open Directory Project as a major source of their search results. It has been found advantageous, for this reason, to also submit your site directly to DirectHit

Auto Submit Tools
Automatic submission tools (software or web based) are extremely useful and timesaving when it comes to submitting your site to several hundred search engines and directories. By all means, use them. But make sure that you do not use them for Infoseek and AltaVista if you are submitting more than just one page.

Miscellaneous, & Foreign Search Engines
Niche markets, can be very worthwhile for specific sites.