I'm sitting here in my office pondering my response to a question posed by a client. "I'm going to hire someone from India for $25 bucks to submit my site to 200 directories." Not bad I suppose, assuming a) he can actually get a link from 200 directories, and b) those directories are actually valuable. Luckily he didin't spend much money for these supposed links, however, I've seen countless clients/web site go overboard in their link acquisitions, trying to score one way links for cheap regardless of value. 

Let's review something about links and their impact on your SERP (search engine results page) position. Only relevant links have weight, and of those relevant links (relevant to your web site niche,) one way links (web site pointing to you and you not pointing to them) are worth the most.

Our experience has shown that the vast majority of free web directories are useless when it comes to their value as a 'one way link'. These web directory pages are rarely spidered, and offer little value to their users; Google knows this, and values them accordingly. There are only a handful of good web directories that are free, and a handful more good directories you need to pay for. (JoeAnt, Business.com, Yahoo Directory, Dmoz (free once in), to name a few.) The rest are just wasted space/time.

For $25 bucks, hey, go for it, maybe you'll get something will come from it, but don't be spending hours of your own time trying to submit to hundreds of directories, put that time into content creation. I'll use an analogy to help you understand what I mean.

If you have a store (a real one, not online), what use is it to have 50 gravel roads with massive potholes pointing to your store that has hardly anything in the shelves? If you get one paved road everyone's going to use it and note it's value, customers will bypass all other roads (some of which are dead ends, have trees blocking the route, or roll through bad parts of town.)

However, people will only use the quality road to get to your store if you have good services/products inside, or else no point of a nice new road. Some people may even think your store is important because it has so many roads pointing to it but once the urban planner comes by and checks you out he'll note the one nice road. He'll in turn tell the city marketer that your store isn't that accessible and the marketer will in turn take you off the 'recommended stores' list. (Ok that one's a stretch....)

To sum up, spend your time writing great content and not submitting to free directories who have limited value in themselves, if any. Complement that content writing time by finding some key links, doesn't have to be loads, to your key articles. You'll reap better traffic this way.