My experience has been that submitting your website to the search engines is unecessary as they will find you.
I would hope that "content quality" simply goes without saying, though the fact that it is often never said makes me question that... especially when I do see what is at the top of the SERPs. I often find what I'm looking for on page three or later, before that in many searches is a bunch of hacked up crap content that was auto generated by robots or non-english speaking content writers. I make it a strict point to NEVER click on the ads of a site that does not look like it is at least trying, and if I see that a crappy site is stumbled in my search, I'll head back to give it a thumbs down and label it as spam. Content is king, and as such should make it to the top of each and every list like this. Noting uniqueness and quality should also be mentioned... Though, the OP did say FRESH content... lets hope the quality was implied