If you're a newbie when it comes to search engine promotion, you will quickly find out that it takes more work getting SE traffic than just submitting. You must structure your page well and target the right keywords. You must also do things such as link trading in order to increase your sites link popularity. Thirdly, search engine promotion is an ongoing thing. Its not like you just submit your site and then your done with it.
Search engines are VERY quirky.
They drop pages for seemingly no reason. And even directories might delete your site for whatever reason. This is something that you really have to watch over constantly and re-submit as needed. Lastly, I highly recommend doing all submissions by hand. A lot of search engines just don't like submissions that are coming from automated programs.