Forum Signatures - direct real traffic from people who view and click your sig especially if you maintain your thread. Possible back links when a thread become popular and got PR overtime. Link directories - submit and forget. No traffic. Your link will be burried 3 to 4 levels inside on the page with no PR... Link directory submission is dead...
I do agree with you that Directory submissions are not a great source of traffic however, they help in increasing the sites SERPS for targeted keywords. This in the long run would help in increasing organic traffic from search engines which would much greater than the traffic you can expect from forum signatures. So it completely depends if you are thinking long term or short term.
I agree with you, directory can only help abit on serp and pr. Better go for foru posting, it can help on seo too and bring good traffic to your website
I will say forum links are good comparing to directories . Forum links and feed sing are dofollow as well as provide real traffic also .
Forum links are a good and reliable source for backlinks but if you are thinking about increasing your site SERP, directory submissions (lots of them) is the way to go. In my experience, i've often gotten the best link popularity from directory submissions.
I think forum links are a little better because they can provide real traffic from forums. Directories are ussually trafficless, but they too help in SERPs.
Both methods are pretty old and serve their use until you can break out of the mold and get some real traffic through organic search and real marketing techniques. Once you break out of the thousand visitors per day threshold forums / directories become quite useless in the overall models. But until then they are not bad avenues to explore.
I think he means more for SEO than traffic? I have submitted to probably 5-10 directories a week and track my backlinks and rarely do I see the links even being indexed by google. The directories do bury the links 3-4 and sometimes as much as 7 pages deep where they get nearly no link juice passed onto them. I would say forum sigs are a good way to not only get seo and a small amount of traffic but also to make yourself an expert in your niche by making insightful posts that let people know you know what you are talking about in that niche.
It depends on the directory, but you are right. But on the other hand directory submission is faster - you can do it without any attention, even with automated software. And some more links won't hurt you.
I think it's best to just go for both. It's better to get as much accessible traffic that your site can achieve. Any method no matter how little the traffic you may get, long term or short term, in the end you will receive traffic, but most often I use forum posting and sometimes I submit my websites to link directories.
I do both but I put more faith in forum posting as it generates a lot more organic traffic for me. Directories probably help me more in SERPS but I work on traffic production more
In my mind the questions is what is more effective for increasing SERPs. The amount of traffic for either method is trivial compared to ranking in one of the big SE for a good keyword.