With all the discussion about link building let's not forget about local search directories. While we may generally be negative on 'regular directory submission' it is important to submit to local directories if you offer a local service. For instance type in Vancouver Washington Painting Contractors and you will find many sites that are local directory listing sites. Obviously the key is to beat them to position 1 (not hard to do) but the listing itself may bring traffic from locals who actually use one of the directories. For instance even though I can search for local listings I will often use smartpages dot com because the results are cleaner. They have already cleaned out the spam so to speak. That's the problem with the serps is for local listings for many topics the serps serve up a bunch of garbage. Really, you may end up with a couple contractors who got to page 1 because they did some seo but they may be the worse bunch in town to do business with. Whereas, with smartpages you get to see a list of perhaps 100 contractors that do roofing or siding or painting so you have more choices at your fingertips quickly than scrolling thru page after page of serp results that are disorganized and not good results.