First off, we want to squash any preconceived ideas that you have about what directory submissions can actually do for you. Mainly, we do not want you to expect a flood of traffic from the directories themselves. The direct visits from these directories to your website is typically negligible. There are so many factors to consider, but it would be surprising to see more than 20 visits from any one directory to your website in any month for a regular, non paid, non reciprocal directory submission process such as this directory submission service offers.

This opinion is based on our experiences with directory submissions: If another company tries to tell you that you'll receive a flood of traffic from the directories themselves, they are lying to you. You should steer clear of such companies, as they either do not know what they are talking about or they are intentionally misleading you. In either case: it's bad news for you. Again, this is our opinion, based on our experiences: nothing more.

All that being said, what is the point of directory submissions then?

It's pretty simple. Submission of your website to seo friendly directories can increase overall traffic to your website and give you better exposure in search engines. While you may not receive a lot of direct hits from visitors of directories to your website, your search engine rankings and natural search engine traffic and can increase significantly. This is due, at least in part, to several or even hundreds of websites linking to yours, causing search engines to crawl your website more frequently. On top of this you may increase your ranking in search engines for specific keywords or phrases due to the link anchor text used in the directory submission process.

The downside of directory submissions are that they can be time consuming. If you don't have a good method for submitting, a single submission can take you up to 3 minutes or more. Even with our seo directory list it will take most people around 2 minutes or more per submission. If you were to submit your website to 100 of these directories yourself it would conservatively take you 3 hours, though most likely in the range of 4 hours, and that's only 100 submissions. When time is money it is not prudent for you to spend your time on directory submissions if you don't have a method for doing it effectively.