Kari,

I have seen too many of these as well...I have enjoyed my own work to day...I have been in Active Rain about 3 months and I have seen changes in my online hits....I needed to know more about this myself.

I am new to this as well but see how important it is to have your website linked to the right directories.  As well as the right keywords and what are called Meta Tags.  Most high producers are unwilling to talk about it.  Good Luck

I have learned too much about long tail keywords and content to believe all that hoopla. However - I have tried an online version of the phone book / yellow pages in hopes of some traffic there. I'll report back on my results in May.

I think the paid direcotories used to be worth while because they used to get a lot of hits, and really would send traffic to your site. Now, Google is dinging many of them for having "pay for" links. They don't get that much traffic, and probably don't give you much good search engine juice either. It's probably not worth the ROI.

Thanks Paul, please keep me posted on what your results turn out like with the online phone/web directory as I am always looks for good ways to get additional traffic.

Kari

If your hoping to get anything out of them besides SEO than I wouldn't do it (no one actually goes to those sites to find a real estate professional), and then the problem Alan brings up about the links not even counting towards your SEO...so it seems to me that they aren't a great idea.

J ust my two cents though.

-Chris 

I have been researching this pretty heavily the last few months on this and other SEO forums, and everything I have read says do not pay for links, they are garbage, and google tends to ignore links that they know come from pay sites