Submitting your sites to search engines does nothing, whether you submit it by hand, or whether a computer program submits you. It is a waste of time. If you get a link on a site that google crawls every day, you can have yourself indexed in one day. Submitting to google gaurantees nothing. Maybe within a month they will crawl you, but that still doesn't gaurantee that you will have a high ranking. In order to have a high ranking, you need to have a high google page rank. In order to get a high google page rank, you need to have lots of relevant links pointing to your site. Think of each link pointing to yourself as a vote for yourself. The more votes you get, the higher you will come up on the search results. If you run a site that sells golf t-shirts, a link from a site that sell s golf related items will be very helpfull, however a link from a site that sells shoes would not help as much.
The basic steps for getting high SEO are:
1. Format your pages to consistently repeat the same keywords, in your title, your metatags, and your body.
2. Get alot of links to your site. Either by link exchanges, or by making a really great site that everyone will link to without you even asking them.