Not to show my age but I remember the days of free directory listings in 
Yahoo and when the Yahoo search engine was the king. Back then you named a web site for the keywords you wanted to be listed for and got listed in the directory and Bam! you were in the top ten in Yahoo’s search engine.
But those days are over and getting listed in the directory section of Yahoo seems like it is not worth it anymore but is it? I say YES and I will tell you why.
So for 299 per year you get a link from a valued site that the major search engines still recognize plus the ability to get some traffic. I will take that all day long. But we all have executives to answer to or clients so lets look at the ROI of a Yahoo directory listing.
Calculating ROI on this can be done a few ways. I would look at it from a link buy, pay per click, and sales/lead generation side. So lets find an example.
Since I work in the online education space lets use the term “online education”. Getting your site listed in http://dir.yahoo.com/Education/Distance_Learning/Web_Directories/?o=a has a PR of 4. I can tell you that going to a link broker to buy a link from a PR 4 page with limited links on the page wil set you back 100 per month. So after three months you have broken even on your investment.
From a pay per click POV the average CPC for this term is 7.87. So you need will need 38 click within a year to break even on a PPC ROI. Lets look at it from a sales/lead ROI. The average CPL is 50.00/lead so you need to get 6 leads within a year to break even.
So as you can see this is why I still love Yahoo search engine directory submission program and I think if you look at it like this in your industry you will feel the same way too.
