In old days of world wide web, users preferred to visit web directory to find website they are looking for.
As a matter of fact, Yahoo!, one of the preferred destination for online users, started as a web directory. Nowadays, most online user base rely on search engines too along with link directories, to find what they're looking for.
When search engines started to become popular, they were heavily relied on KEYWORDs and METATAGs of the web page to determine the topic and relevance of the page. Webmasters discovered that by keyword stuffing into METATAGs and webpage content, they could improve their website position in search results for verious keywords. But search engines are smart!. Search engines caught up to the abuse and decided to ignore the METATAGs and rely instead on text content of web page. Webmasters then started to keyword stuffing in the webpage content, often writing them in the same color as the web page's background so for webpage visitors as well as search engines that content is invisible.
Again, search engines worked on that area and discovered the trick and decided that the best way to rank a web page's content and its topical relevance was to rely on inbound links from other web pages. The rationale behind this is that it is much more difficult to influence other people to link back to your website than it is to manipulate your own web page elements. In fact, inbound links are the foundation of Google's Pagerank™ algorithm.
There are several ways to get inbound links, among them writing articles that include your bylines with a link to your page, link exchange, and add link to web directory are the poupler techniques.
Listing your sites in good link directories is probably the best way to get quality links that are highly valued by the search engines. Since web directories rely on human editors who enforce strict criteria to list a web site, and since directories organize the information in highly focused categories, they are an invaluable resource for search engines to measure the quality and the relevance of a web page.
In summary, web directories are important not because they generate significant traffic, but because they are given great importance by the search engines to qualify and rank web pages, and to determine their topical relevance.
So the bottomline is, you should definitely list your websites with quality web directory such as www.itsallaboutlinks.com, if you want to increase your chances of success with the search engines.
Importance of Web Directory for Search Engines