The best strategy is, probably, to ignore search engine submission completely. Search Engines have what are called spiders, that will crawl the web, following links. The best option is to submit your site to as many free directories as you can. This will ensure that your site eventually gets crawled in a timely fashion.
Be wary of sites that claim to submit your site to "300+ search engines and directories" for free, or $99.99. Whatever the case, these sites are usually automated submission scripts which boast high rankings and gold at the end of the rainbow. I assure you, they do not deliver, and you're out the money. The problem is that it's an automated process (non-organic). The fact is that these directories and search engines change their submission procedures quite regularly, and in reality, it's impossible to keep an automated submission script up to date with thousands of sites. Plus, as we described above, submitting to search engines is a waste of time, since they will eventually crawl your site if you have good inbound links.
If you’re still interested in search engine submission, you’ll find another useful resource at the end of this page.
Dmoz.org (http://www.dmoz.org) is the human edited directory. In the early days of SEO, it was always suggested you first submit to the dmoz (open directory) project. However, more recently, it seems that people are finding their submission waiting in queue for months at a time. At this time, finally, Dmoz like to be dead project, at least for me. Corrupted editors, broken rules… And – the most important thing – Google don’t care about dmoz anymore. But, it is not so hard procedure and I still advice you to submit your site. Just don’t expect whatever result – if you get listed in dmoz, this will be just because your lucky angel helps
The main reason Dmoz was so popular, is that if you got added, you got a pretty sweet PR link from directory.google.com within a few months. If they aren't updating the feed from Dmoz, then it kind of defeats the purpose.
However, it doesn't take much to submit to a category, so it's probably worth doing. First, find the most relevant category you can find. And only submit once. If you submit the same site to multiple categories, they will simply reject it. ALso, make sure the category you are submitting to actually has an "editor" (this will be displayed at the bottom of the page). If there is no editor, go up a category, and if the parent category has an editor, submit to that one.
You can submit your site to Yahoo!'s directory (http://directory.yahoo.com), it is not known how long these submissions take, or what percentage they include. However, there are many sites that have been approved free. But the quick way is only one – paid inclusion.
Instead of categorising sites based on subject matter, Gimpsy (http://www.gimpsy.com) categorises them by the activities offered by those sites. Unlike traditional directories, that view the Internet as a vast library of 'books' offering information and categorising them according to their subject, Gimpsy views the WWW as virtual city and the sites in it are service providers, allowing the visitors to accomplish a task or engage in a desired activity.
It uses complex filtering and natural language querying to attempt to provide accurate results.
Abilogic (http://www.abilogic.com) is a new directory that offers one free submission per domain name. Submission took 1 day to get approved, and allows for your own keyword phrase, title, and description. No link exchange required.
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Best recommendation: "submit" to google by getting an inbound link from a site (or group of sites) with high PageRank (as seen in Google Toolbar)
Yahoo has been competing directly with Google on the search front, as well as online advertising. Yahoo publisher now has a similar product to Google adsense.
MSN has become quite competitive with Google and Yahoo in the last couple of years.
For more detailed info on free and quick search engine submission process – visit this link. You’ll find at the address above my favorite SEO tool too, which can help you with some “automated” submission. (And, when it’s free and automated, it may worth to do it)