There is no point trying to submit to these search engines...
Inktomi - Feeds over 125 search engines (Yahoo, HotBot, MSN, Overture, About...) and has been adquired by Yahoo; No free submission service available at the moment. Pay for inclusion or wait until they find a link to your site in the net.
Excite - Dead, now uses pay-per-click results
Direct Hit - Replaced with Teoma
Northern Light - No longer available to the general public
Lycos - Uses AlltheWeb's index
Submitting my site is enough?
No. Indexing will take up to 8 weeks, but this is not enough to start getting visitors. Being in the top search results depends mostly (but not only) on popularity of your site, and a new site is not popular at all. So you may need a different strategy.
In case you are using a popular free hosting service, robots may never visit your site. It is convenient to have your own site with your own domain name. In case you have not got it, check 6 international extensions in only one click here (fast search without graphics).
Simple strategy to increase popularity
Let's suppose you site includes a html tutorial. You will need to search for "html tutorial" at google (or other search engine). Search results will show a list of sites. Copy the URL of one site which is related to your topic (for example "www.htmltutor.com" and find who is linking to them in the net by searching at Google for "link:http://www.htmltutor.com". Some of the pages linking to that site are probably pages including links to several html tutorials. Visit them one by one and ask webmaster to add a link to your site. This procedure is very time consuming, but it is very effective to increase your position at search engines.
Pay-per-click search engines
Perhaps you need to increase very fast the number of visitors to your site, or it worth to you paying to get visitors. In this case, pay-per-click search engines may be an interesting option for you. The procedure is simple: users will search for keywords in the search engine, and they will get a list of results. The top results correspond to paid listings. In case you click on them, the owner of the site will be charged. If your keywords are very common, to be listed in the very top may be very expensive (for example: the top position for "hosting" at overture.com is by sure over $1.0 per click (check here the cost of your keywords at overture.com, which is the most important pay-per-click search engine). Use this search suggestion tool to find keywords.
Pay-per-click search engines may be very interesting to make your site visible (mostly in case your keyword is very specific to an specific subject, and there are few pages about that subject in the web). Consider this option as an inversion.
Tip!:
What is SEO? (Search Engine Optimization)
Banner exchange programs
Banner exchange services may be interesting for you, but do not rely only on this services to increase the number of visitors to your site. In case your Banner is atractive enough you will get up to 5 visits per 1000 banners displayed in other sites. And you will need to display another 1000 banners in your site (or more) from other companies. So it is not very effective.
Submission to over 700.000 directories and search engines
Some sites will provide this kind of service. They will ask you for your email or inclusion of an specific code for banners in your page. Your email will become very popular and you will get a lot of spam. The only potential benefit of this services is that your site may be found by robots throught links in those directories (but robots are prepared to recognize these directories, and they will not index most of them). It is our recomendation not to use this services.
Getting money from ads in your site
Most sites will be unable to pay expenses until they are getting about 10.000 unique visitors per month. So do not place ads in your site unless you are having those visitors. The cheapest hosting services will be enought to handle this amount of visitors (p.e.: Doteasy for just $25.00/year with 20 MB storage space).