I can tell you from my own experience, its one of the best things you can do to improve your ranking and getting more traffic. By all means spend some time doing article submission to top article directories such as ezine. Good luck.
of course, it can help your site get indexed and give you backlinks, your keywords ranking will slowly raise too.
all depends on where you submit to. article submission helps you get some traffic to your site and at the same time helps you get some backlinks. with directory submission, its the list of directory that counts most. if you can submit to good list of directories, then you will get some good benefit out of it
Definitely will helps you lot. but you should aware of selecting article directory and directory listing. Do select high PR directories.
Articles always return some thing..But the only thing which matter is content of it...Also the directories PR on which you are submitting it..
They Do, however just a few submissions never help. Directory submissions are not too great for SEO as much as article submissions. Both these methods can gain you referral traffic.
Article submission and dir. submission gives you backlinks, so yes it is important in ranking factor as well as PR.