Search Engines & payments

Hi,
could someone give me a final answer to why on earth there are sites out there where you can pay for submitting your website to the top 100 search engines etc...when as far as i understand, search engines are automated robots that navigate the internet and index the pages accordingly. So if that is the case, these sites that take payment are bluffs? and the best way to get your site up higher on a search engines having a lot of sites link to you. besides of course the meta tags etc...
Or am i missing something here?
Thanks,

paying for submission is stupid because bots will crawl your page as soon as they find one link that point to it... paying for page optimization makes sence but you can do that by yourself (I guess services you mentioned include SEO, or maybe some lame trick integration, like doorways pages or such a spam), just check some tutorials regarding SEO... it's not only in linking and metatags (second ones are useless on main engines now)... it's too late here, im too tired to write, but someone will give you further info...

There're companies, who claim they can get your sites into search engines quick, can't even get their own pages into the serach engines.

If you're just looking for a quick way "to the top" and have $ to spend you can use Adwords. No seo required...

Quick impressions w/o SEO are more than great and adwords is best choice for them... it depends on your needs, but it can be marketing service you will ever be using to promote your business. If output is better than input, of course What you said is true, top ranking can be quite good free traffic builder... still, you ARE #1 thru adwords

As long as there are people willing to part with their $ there will be people there to take it.

Search Engine submission, automated or manual, is a waste of time.

Amen.

they just want to get your money