After you have built a website and optimized it by tuning its meta tags to the best, it is the time to get it submitted to major search engines and directories. So, that your site gets indexed by the search engines and the directories. There are lot of confusions in submission to search engines and web directories. Here, I would try to clear this confusion. A close study of search engines and web directory will sure help to solve this confusion.

search engines

When you submit your website to a search engine, it reads your site meta tags, looks their relationship with the contents, indexes you website and assigns a rank to your site according to the algorithm it follows. Here, you should understand that by submitting your site to a search engine does not mean that you will start getting high traffics just after its submission. This simply means that now the search engine knows about your site and its pages and would place you in its SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) according to your rank in its index.

You must have read very often about the offers for submitting your site to thousands of search engines for a fee, no matter small or big. No doubt that there are really thousand of search engines on the web but most searches are routed through a few major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, alltheweb etc. If you submit to these search engines alone, it is really enough to get noticed in the search engine world. I am giving their site submission URLs and little info about their strategies.

Google

http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl.
They ask you to submit your top level page and have pretty easy to understand instructions for submission. Google updates its index normally once a month.

Yahoo

http://submit.search.yahoo.com/.
They have two options free and paid. Free listing takes about 30 to 45 days. However paid listing assures a quick listing of your site.

MSN

http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx.
MSN in routine picks new websites having good inbound links. So if you have good inbound links, your site will be picked for listing in MSN even if you don't submit your site to them.

AOL

You can not submit to AOL directly but if your site is indexed by Google, AOL will most likely include your site in its index too.

Web Directories

Web directories are different with respect to search engines. A search engine uses its algorithm to index and rank a website through its regular crawling process whereas a web directory is defined into several categories and subcategories where it contains the websites submitted. In this way a web directory is considered an expert index of sites. Here you select a category and subcategory for your site and submit your site to it. Visitors come to brows a specific category in a directory as per their interest. This ensures that your presence in a specific category will attract a targeted visitor. Most of the search engines use these directories to update their data. This also increases your chance of getting high rank with search engines.

These directories can be classified into free directories and paid directories. Normally, free directories take comparatively more time to list the submitted sites. Whereas the paid directories list the submitted sites instantly. Some good free directories are DMOZ, Yahoo!, World Wide Index, AbiLogic, Gimpsy, JoeAnt. However, good paid directories can be named as Arielis, BOTW, BlueFind, Microsoft bCentral, and GoGuides.

Before submitting your site review your site thoroughly and make sure that your site has no broken or dead links. Write a suitable description of your site to put into the description field of submission form. Search thoroughly the categories and subcategories before selecting the category for your site. They normally offer you to suggest one if you don't find a suitable one.

No doubt, submitting your site to major search engines and good rank directories help increasing the traffic and good placement in SERP (Search Engine Result Pages). Submission to good directories is something which ensures this goal.