Submission: In relation to the internet, the definition of submission has to do with making information systems (especially search engines) aware of your website. Before search engines would index websites on their own, a submission was required, often by the site's webmaster. Today, however, submission is not necessary in most cases because of search engine crawlers (or bots).
There are two methods still used to submit a website to a search engine. One is submit one web page at a time; the other is submit the entire site through its sitemap. This type of submission is important because it can potentially get a website listed on the first page somewhere in the top 10 search results.
In 2005, Google introduced Google Sitemaps to help index webpages. It also helps web developers publish an entire list of links for their websites. The sitemaps are also known as XML sitemaps, which help specify locations for search engines with a robots.txt file. While the application doesn't guarantee that Google will index all pages of a website, according to their Webmaster Guidelines, it does give the crawler more information about the website's structure to help improve indexing. Google does not penalize webmasters for using Sitemap submission.
Bing uses a similar protocol (sitemaps.org), and Yahoo recently merged with Bing to use Bing's webmaster tools.
This type of submission is not to be confused with electronic submissions, which allow users to send information over the web through a site's web form.