Directories are not that helpful now. Although people still tend to submit on directories, it is a little hep now but can be a good way to index your sites well and be seen.
Submission to DMOZ etc. are very helpful primarily because of the parent domain's PR; but not only that, because they have been around for so long they have very high authority which Google & other search engines like
I agree with all of you guy. I am a new of SEO, but what i start is to write my unique articles to post to High page rank directory as you mentioned. I know it's a hard work, but only this way can improve my ranking in search engine. I will show you the result soon when i get high ranking in search engine. Thanks for sharing.
I've had good success with my blog http://thinkingfashion.org by submitting the site to relevant directories ie anything to do with fashion or blogging. By that I dont mean just a section of the directory says fashion I mean that the whole directory is dedicated to fashion sites.
They help in SEO and provide backlinks. I generally don't use paid directories as there are enough free ones that seem to work well for me already.
In fact there are very small piece of dirs that can be valuable(like dmoz) most of them are represented like link farms lost of time
Good and quality web directories improves your website page rank and also increase your inbound links.
Some of my friends say that google now hate web directory very much, so submission to them is useless. Anyone confirms this?