From the standpoint of traffic...

I have a new site and want to drive traffic to it without sending 100,000 of dollars to google for almost nothing. What I need right now is traffic, not necessarily backlinks or PR, at least not right this minute. What, if any, directories are good for bringing in traffic?

 

In general most directories wont bring you the traffic you require, instead the backlinks will raise your serps in many cases resulting in the search engines sending traffic instead.

What have you done so far to get traffic?

 

You can get some instant traffic from stumbleupon, digg, fark or other social bookmarking sites & forums signatures. But they wont last long. If you are looking for constant flow of traffic you have to optimize your site for search engines. That cant be possible instantaneously. Its a long process, and there's no shortcut.

 

Unless you use adwords, which of course can be quite expensive.

 

well a directory will not get much traffic anyway as it does not have a lot of content etc..but as your page rank increases so does your search engine ranking which will help you get some traffic, at the moment I would recommed as mikey stated to submit to other directories as that should help you.

thanks

 

An untrue generalisation as you don't know the traffic levels of all these directories. If you are talking about General copycat directories, then you are largly true in what you say as these ARE worthless in any terms. But the specialist directories are highly targeted indeed and in some cases so good, that they are used over the smaller main search engines like AltaVista.

Please remember the goal of every searcher - to seek information and they will use the best tools for that job, which happens to be something focussed and targeted. The major SE's are great starting points, no doubt about that, except when you want to drill down to something specialised, they are just useless for finding deeper information. They are too slow, and speed or finding info is now the key thing for searchers.

Except it's the wrong traffic......

 

Maybe you can explain that a little more?

The search engines I use, yahoo and gooogle seem to show data quickly and accurately.

I do a agree that niche directories can be more helpful because you can find newer sites without sifting through the 40 pages of results.

 

you can get traffic from signature links.
many people buy signature links to get traffic.

 

Ok, I mean general engines have too much information and too many pages to trawl through - this makes searching slower as you have to search more mixed results pages.

Mixed results pages is a major hassle for any searcher, niche resources don't have this problem and is why they are popular.

 

I am glad there is someone around here besides myself who is contradicting this 'all directories don't provide traffic' nonsense.

You are exactly right when you say the general directories with their default templates and DMOZ dumps are not going to bring traffic. But there are many of us who own niche sites and to a lesser extent some of the better general directories who are actually sending the sites listed on our sites highly targeted traffic that can and does convert.

My suggestion to your original question is to seek out established directories in your site's niche. They will bring you traffic directly as well as through increased SERPs.

Unfortunately, huge amounts of traffic fast, other than the kind from StumbleUpon and the others is going to cost you money and time.

 

I can tell you for a fact that there are definately some directories that actually do send qualified traffic. Not all do, most don't in fact but well established and good niche directories certainly do. I can give you hundreds of genuine testimonials to support that.

 

Of course you're talking of directories traffic which means less or more 10 uniques per day. For other purposes such traffic is just a big NULL.

 

I would be happy to get 10 targeted traffic a day from the few dozen directories I am listed in. It would not equal a big NULL, it would be great.

10 targeted traffic per directory multiply by 34 directory listings equals 340 targeted traffic a day = lot more than NULL

 

You don't know what traffic any of the directories I'm involved provide, and your way off the mark with 10 UV per day.