You are smart to be critical of individuals and websites that promote submitting a website to the search engines on a continual basis. Years back, this was a standard (and worth-while) SEO practice but these days, the only ones who promote it’s value are those who are trying to make a buck off the ignorance of others and those who just can’t be bothered to maintain up-to-date SEO knowledge.
If a website has zero links to it from other sites, search engines can only recognize its existence if you submit the site to them via their site submittal interface. But, if there is a single link pointing to the site, search engines will find it and crawl it. Once the site (or page) is crawled it will be cued up for another crawl with the interval based on how how many worthwhile links point to the site/page. Continueing to submit the page will not increase that interval.
That being said, if your site has a small number of links pointing to it from web pages of little or no value (according to the search engines) then it may be a long, long time before spiders reach your site via those links. This is because the value a page has in a search engine (we’re talking mainly Google, here) is a major factor in how often the search engine returns to that page to see if anything new has appeared on it. A site of zero value may get crawled as little as a few times a year (if that) and if the only link to your website is on such a page, Google just isn’t going to know about your link until the next time it gets back to crawl that page.
