There are hundreds and thousands of search engines out there on the web to submit your website. But the reality is 90% of users use main ones to get where there going. Google, Live, Yahoo are the top 3 sites on the web today. At the moment you should only be concerned with the top 3 ones when submitting your site.
Once you get listed on the main ones, you'll eventually get listed to on the other less used search sites. Alot of these less used ones are portals to Google and Yahoo. For example:
Netscape.com has a search box that pulls the result from Google and displays it on there Netscape page.
Submit Site Create atleast 20 pages before you submit to any of the main sites.
Submitting your website to the search engines may take awhile to show up on there search engines. Google may take up to 2 weeks or even a month. Submitting your website to Live may take a day. Be patient and eventually you will see results.
Be Patient Submitting Alot of people get excited and can't wait to see there website on Google and Yahoo. Submitting your site several times may cause to be banned from these sites.
Google loves content If you enjoy writing content, well this is great. Google loves content. Sites like Google loves meaty sites with alot of content. Google will show a site with alot of content than a site with alot of pictures.
I hope this was hopeful to you, good luck and make sure you post to the main searches.
To find out more you can view my site at Webtwilight.com