Once you've submitted you should watch your site stats, you should notice spiders visiting shortly, how long it takes could be a few days to a month or more depending on where the search engine is in it's update cycle. To identify the spiders you will need to look at their HTTP_USER_AGENT, also known as their web browser. For a full listing of robot user agents see our article "Search Engine Robots."  

Once you notice the spider in your logs it can additional time for you to actually be listed on the search engines. Not all engines update their listings as soon as new ones are available, some will wait up to a month or more before publishing the new listings so that they can update all sites at once.

Getting into search engines can often be as timely a process as getting into directories, even though search engines use robots that automate the process. You should be patient and refrain for resubmitting your site. The only time you should resubmit your site is if you notice a search engine spider in your logs but 6 weeks go by without your site appearing in their index, or if your site gets dropped from the index. At the same time don't worry about over submitting, search engines generally don't mind that anymore.