Many people asks if they should submit their newly build website to anyplace.
It is certainly okay to submit your main home page URL to the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. Once the search engine knows your home page, it will be able to index the rest of your pages simply by following your navigation links. Often sites will get indexed by the search engines even if you do not submit your URL as long as someone else is linking to your site. Search engines have crawlers that follows links and it may find your site by following someone else's link. As the crawler does this, the search engine keeps tracks of how many links is coming to your site and from which sites they are coming from. This information is analyzed algorithmically by the search engine to determine your search placement in the search results page. Hence, that is why it is important to have good links coming to your site from good popular high page-ranked sites.
There are directories to which you can submit your site to get your site listed. There are many different types of directories, and you should evaluate which directories to submit to. You can read what Chris Beasley have to say about directory submission. Certainly, it is fine to submit to the large directories such as Yahoo Directory and The Open Directory Project (also known as DMOZ). As for the smaller directories, it is debatable as to how effective they are.
Some people may see ads for services that would say submit websites to hundreds of different places for a small fee. In general, I would recommend against that. Chris of Website Publisher Forums says "absolutely not" [reference thread here].
You have to look at those services very carefully. Depending on the service, it can at best be only slightly effective. And at worst, the service is spamming and is unethical. In Chris' article, he says "There is software or services out there that will automatically post rubbish at forums and blogs to get you links, this is spam"
