After speaking with many website owners, I find many still believe that having a link in someone’s little-known directory is going to bring valuable traffic.
What matters is not the number of hits or unique visits alone. Rather, the quality of the traffic. If your visitors are stopping by randomly and have no real interest in your site or the contents, you’re unlikely to close a sale or generate a lead which is what really matters. You want targeted traffic. Most targeted traffic come from search engine results not from directory listings unless your searcher is looking in the online yellow pages.
The purpose of text links is to increase your search engine rankings. Sure, on occasion a visitor might stop by because of a listing your site has on another site and end up purchasing something from you. Consider that a bonus. This may be traffic but in most cases, it’s unqualified, random traffic.
The real value is when a person enters their key phrase(s) in the search engine search box and your site is listed among the top 10 search engine results in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
If you selected targeted keywords to optimize for, you stand a very good chance of getting that visitor to buy something or do something you want (like opt-in to your newsletter or bookmark your site for a revisit later). They clearly showed interest by performing a conscious, deliberate search for information.