Website Submission to Search Engines

The first thing you need to know is that you don't need to submit your website.  The search engines prefer to find your website themselves via incoming links from other websites.  At this point, submitting your website is largely a waste of time.

Likewise, the search engines largely ignore meta tags, so you shouldn't worry about not having access to them.  The exceptions to this are your page title, which is important (and not really a meta tag) and your description meta tag, which is handy, but not essential.

Search engines decide for themselves what keywords your page should be listed for and how highly they should be ranked based on their own complex algorithms.  By design, the details of how these algorithms work is a carefully guarded secret.  However, of those many factors, people have a pretty good idea about a few of them and that knowledge forms the basis of SEO (search engine optimization).  It is a process by which you can optimize your website for the search engines.  The best SEO overview currently available is www.seo-guy.com/tutorial.html.  Take the time to carefully review that tutorial and you will have a good start.

Based on the nature of your website (ie. having limited access), there will be some things listed in the tutorial that you can't act on.  At that point, you will have to decide whether this third-party product is acceptable to you or too limiting.

I was researching WebPosition where you can create a "doorway page" that redirects to your regular website main page.  Has anyone done this?  

I should have included this above, too - the Google Webmaster Guidelines is a good read (www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html) because it gives you a good overview of what Google is looking for.

If you read those, you will see in the Quality Guidelines: "Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™" and "Avoid 'doorway' pages created just for search engines".  Google pays a lot of very smart people a lot of money to develop algorithms that can detect and penalize these sorts of things.  There are no reliable shortcuts in SEO.  Your efforts will be better rewarded if they are focused on improving your site rather than outsmarting these folks.

Or, as Google says: "Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles listed above will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit."

As much as anything else, that statement defines Google's overall philosophy.

I have a very good website I just dont have access to change content or code.  How about submitting to directories?

"I have a very good website I just dont have access to change content or code."

Then you are very limited in terms of the on-page optimization you can do.  However, there are off-page factors as well, such as incoming links (which are very important).  Directories are useful because they provide an incoming link and can generate traffic as well.  You should definitely submit your website to relevant directories.  One of the most important is the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org).  Be careful to avoid link farms, though.

It seems like I dont have much avenue.  I will try to get them to change what I need.

Search engines decide for themselves what keywords your page should be listed for and how highly they should be ranked based on their own complex algorithms..
>>does this means that once a site is submitted to the SE, there is no need to further optimize pages in the future?  I thought that this is a constant process to get the ranking you want.

I presume you mean once a site is listed rather than submitted.  Once a search engine has listed a page, it will return on a regular basis and take into account anything that is changed.  The search engine index is updated from time to time (about a month in the case of Google) to reflect these changes.

Therefore, you can make changes over time and test the effect on your search engine rankings.  Optimization is an ongoing process.  But new and updated content is also important.  Search engines like fresh pages.

What I meant was that it doesn't really matter what keywords you want for your site.  Search engines will crawl your pages and see what words and phrases are most prominent and best represent the content of your page.  Those are your actual keywords even if they are not your intended keywords.

Then I need to focus more on what I need to do to get my site SE crawled and this is done by submitting to directories?