Reality: There is no "Right" way anymore, when it comes to link bulding...unless....

[Jiminy]

I said "anymore" in the title loosely, as things are always changing.

SEO is one of the most subjective topics. One person, it may mean link building, to another, it may mean on site changes, etc...The disputes for what is right, or what is wrong, is never ending.

For example, you can check a thread about article spinning, 1/2 the people say it works, the other 1/2 avoid it. Some say on site seo is the most important, others say its not. Same thing with using duplicate content, using automation tools, blog posting, etc....Nothing really is concrete, especially with google.

Take this example.
One of my sites held rank #1 for almost the past year for a few keywords. For the main keyword, i got bumped to #2, then #3, and now (since the oct 13th update), I am on page 2 or 3. The site that did the bumping was a new site, since maybe may.

But guess what the guy that outranked me did? This is where it gets funny, and it makes me, and you should too, take advice only as "advice" and not "Concrete" from here, or anywhere else...

This other website's main links are composed of backpage and craigslist postings (all of which expire over time), a few hundred backlinks from a paid link on the footer of a single forum, and PAID web directories. His web site does not even use H1 , h2 tags.

I will say, the site is designed nicely, and has a nice layout, but he does NOT use heading tags. The site has a lot of pages, a lot of "empty" pages might I add...

My site was about 40 pages of well written unique content, promoted SLOWLY using web2.0 and a few articles, and had excellent on page SEO.

I want to add one more thing
Today I spent some time randomly analyzing high ranking websites, and they all had one thing in common...Paid directory submissions.

Any thoughts?

[NETDAWG]

I've seen that my competitors that rank well use paid directories also, it's undeniably worth the investment. Ive held out from these for the time being, but plan to sign up for paid directories myself as needed. You can only "dabble" in the PR0-PR1 link arena so long before you have to go for the higher hanging fruit. Basically, my competitors set the bar, I try to emulate what they do and then add in my own link network and strategy - doing a little more than they did.

[Jiminy]

Right. I have easily outranked sites with thousands of backlinks, including directories, but I think it comes down to how focused the directory is. I just recently read that google specifically said that directories do not hurt, but the ones that were designed for SEO (Like most are), will not be very helpful to you. I did a few paid directories today, will see how it works when using it with a few other methods.

[Targeted Traffic]

Well...an intelligent directory strategy provides depth to your SEO campaigns and offers tangible benefits such as more diverse link profile, qualified referral traffic
citations for different vertical ranking algorithms, trust/authority Signals… and, of course... the link.
If you use different directories for different purposes, you can achieve this and more.