Search engine submission pointless?

Do you think search engine optimization is pointless? I read somewhere that if your site is good enough to placed reletivaly high then it will be indexed automatically. Also even when submitting it, says google, your site may still not be added.

Your opinion?

Yes submiting to search engines is pointless. The best way to get indexed is by getting incoming links.

So instead of submiting to search engines, submit your site to directories and you will have better results as those links will also give you pagerank.

I agree with Nikolas- also, updating your site regularly with content is a good way of being indexed.

Do search engines look for new content?

Sure. That's what the search engine crawlers do

Yeah submitting to directories is surely a better way to spend your time. And yes adding content to your site regularly will keep the web crawlers interest in your site.

I'll have to focus my efforts more on this then. I'm sure submitting to search engines is still worth the time.

Add in code to have robots index your site, follow all links and return every 3 days.

Submitting to search engines can actually hurt you, since it puts you very far back in the queue. They will all get to you eventually :)

The best promotion I have done is to hire people for $20-30 to submit my link to 300+ directories.  Its working like a charm as more and more bots come to my site daily.  Google comes up to 6 times a day now.

Submitting MIGHT be worth it if you submit to smaller engines (altavista and so on...). Don't bother submitting to google though, they care very little for submitted sites.

I never submited any sites, and most of my sites are PR5 within weeks.

Incoming links are much more effective IMO

You might want to submit them "to make sure" or if you are not very good at SEO

I always put URLs of new sites i make in one of those search engine submitters that submits it to all the important search engines.  It can't hurt anyway and it only takes a second.

show me who to hire and theyve gota full time job

Posts on SP will get 8-9 responses within the hour ranging from $20 to $150. 

ditto

no i said show me who to hire, im not willing to go searching for people to pay that much to do such simple tasks.

To answer your first question, yeah, it's useless. As for
NO!!! SEO (search engine optimization) is what gets your site in any SE. Also, once it is in the SE, SEO makes that site increase rank.

Edit: It looks like I just went up a level on the post rank "OMG! I am geek" -It's true :)

Submitting sites to search engines for free isn't such a waste of time. PAYING, though, is completely useless. As long as you're linked to a lot and come up in searches Google will have you on there.

Having a sitemap doesn't hurt either.

~Crystal

Posted the content on my site for the first time on Jan 12. Evening of Jan 12 Google was already snooping around. Within a few days all the big players stopped by.

I submitted to none of them. First one to list me was MSN, but still only one page. Google now has my main six pages up; but for some reason nothing in Yahoo yet.

I have noticed that as I am getting into directories and beginning to get backlinks that I am finding my site landing for more keywords. The day after I got listed in a regional directory and on my college's alumni page was when I went from only the index page to the six pages in Google.

I thought it would make for an interesting experiment since I do not have other sites I can use to network and planned on not submitting to any of the big players.