Links to your site are important for that web traffic, but are important in two different ways: building search engine traffic and simple referrals.
Search Engine Traffic
A link into your site from a popular site is useful for positioning you well in the search engines if it is a text link and contains important keyword phrases. Redirected and dynamic links, JavaScript links, and links with the nofollow tag won’t help you much if any, for positioning in results. Links from spamming sites won’t help you, and I don’t trust any Flash links to help me. If the linking text coming in (anchor text) is your company name or your name, it won’t help much unless you are General Motors or some other branded text. Links from images won’t help, either. No anchor text with images.
Most directories can’t help much as they either link from your company name or it’s a redirected or dynamic link, with the actual page results determined when the entry is pulled from a database.
What you really want for good search engine positioning is links from trusted popular sites. Links from .gov or .edu sites are good as they are almost always trusted. If you can figure out a trick to get news on CNN or AP, you are going to get lots of traffic.
Referral Links
Links from most directories and blog postings won’t help your position in the search engine results much, but are important because they may have high traffic and can often refer traffic directly to your web site from their link. Anchor text isn’t that important. A few exceptions are directories like DMOZ (free) and Yahoo ($299/year), which give you a trusted link.
Conclusion
So the question really comes down to how you want people to come into your site. If they will be using the search engines, work to get good links from popular and trusted sites with anchor text that has your keyword phrases. If they are coming in directly from other sites or blogs, put a strategy together for getting your traffic in from those. For example, created a blog swarm by interacting with hundreds of blogs and commenting on the related topic, pointing to a related page on your web site.
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