Directories can serve as a great source of direct and indirect (through assisting your search engine rankings) traffic.

You can find General, Niche and Local directories to submit your website to at Which Directories.

When I've built a new website I submit my site to a proportion of the directories listed on that site depending on:

1. The money I'm willing to spend on the particular project as some of these charge a submission fee, and;

2. The value of the links page inside these directories for the topic that particular project is about. For example, when I submitted Understanding Adsense I checked the page that my link would appear on for things like;

• The number of steps from the homepage my link page would be,
• The title of the page my link would appear on - does it match my keywords?
• The flexibility of the actual link - can I use my target keywords and not my website name?
• The Page Rank of the page my link would appear on,
• The number of links on the page my link would appear on - there should be below 20.

Apply these type of factors to directories which charge a submission fee in particular. It can be a lucrative business charging website owners for what are in effect valueless links - don't pay for things that don't align with your SEO strategy.