Can I get some thoughts on web directory submission. These are my questions: 1. Is it worth paying to submit your site to one? 2. If there is a free option should you accept that and put a link on your homepage? 3. Any other thoughts on them?
It depends how many reciprocal links you have. You should only do reciprocal links with sites related to yours' IMO. Most of the time I pay for it so that it's a one-way link. Just make sure the page where your link will be on is cached by Google (see if it's arranged by PR or alphabetically or date).
It's worth paying for good one way links from pr4+ directories, as usually it comes with the guarantee that it will stay up, a lot of sites are here today and gone tommorrow, how will you know that many who you have performed link exchanges with are still being recipricoal, it means you have to keep monitoring, = time, but i kno there is software that you could put on scheduler to check for you. But paid for in areas or with pages and categories related to you are good, and don't forget to have variants of your link anchor text. so as to not look spammy.
1.) I think so, just try to submit your site to high PR/traffic sites and they are the ones who could answer your question. 2.) Reciprocal links or link exchange might do.