Brian,

  From my own experience being in Yahoo Directory really didn't do anything major. What I am personally finding is that to build authority you are better off investing your time into social media platforms and doing it that way plus it costs far less.

  If you pretty much want to get your site into google or bing the best way I have found is by getting an article into Ezinearticles.

  The other thing is to be careful of listing your sites on paid directories... google has a very clear policy of frowning on paid directory listings which is a bit of an oxymoron cause they do take some weighting from Yahoo Directories.  As for DMOZ my understanding was that it wasn't being updated any longer.

Chris Le Roy
eBusinessCoaching.com.au
 

I wouldn't recommend the Yahoo directory. If you're looking for Australian directories, here are a number of them with decent page rank / domain authority to get you started. However, please review each before reviewing to make sure each is a good fit for your site and has a relevant category for your site: http://www.yellowpages.com.au http://www.manta.com http://www.whitepages.com.au http://www.truelocal.com.au http://www.hotfrog.com.au http://searchsight.com http://www.startlocal.com.au http://www.dlook.com.au http://www.enterprisesearch.com.au http://www.aussieweb.com.au

Yahoo directory is a decent indicator to Google that the sites owner is willing to list their site in a premium directory. 

But the thing is if you are short on cost its probably worth targeting local directories in Australia first for your website/ business listing example True Local/ Start Local ect ect.

Adding a site to yahoo directory is not going to see your ranking instantly boost over night it might just send you some direct traffic and just be another building block to a wider link profile. 

You should also apply for DMOZ too, its not going to do the world, but its another trust factor. The more you build up for your overall link profile trust the better for long term growth. 

I'll say back in the old days Yahoo Directory and DMOZ are definitely two sources of the strong signal for Google to determine your site's ranking. However I doubt it's continue to be true these days. Google itself has also shutdown its own directory product in 2011 (that built on top of DMOZ), which shows being listed on a directory might no longer bring you favour. I also had one personal site listed on DMOZ and as far as I can see, pretty much zero SEO benefit.

Not to mention Yahoo is now headed by an ex-Googler competing on content & ad-serving business. I doubt Google is still using Yahoo's directory data.

Thanks James. I know I wont get an overnight boost in rankings/traffic, but I would like to start building authority on my site. Thanks for the TrueLocal suggestion I will be speaking with them later today.

Regards
Brian

Hey guys, thanks for your responses. I've started out by listing on the many free australian local listings and see how it goes - just a lot of outsourced SEO companies calling me so far.

Great David, I have a few listing on some of those mentioned sites already. BTW slight OT, how long do these links take to show up on webmaster tools?

Ok just reporting back on this.  I have submitted to a handful of Aussie business directories. The next morning after so, I recevied about 6 calls from SEO companies. The first one clearly was a voip call from Philippines which left a bad taste in my mouth and I was quite dismissive of further calls.

Also I have seen a pickup in WMT in impressions and to a lesser extent clicks. HOWEVER i ran this alongside a small adwords campaign, and I also managed to get 2 linkbacks from some quality blogs (4000+ uniques a day). 

Being a young company, I was keen to do as much SEO improvement in the smallest amount of time. If I had the luxury of time, I would definitely stagger all of these steps in hope to see how effective each of them are.