I have seen a recent jump in my rankings for one of my sites and i attribute it to a couple of things. 

First is pages focused on the main subject. My pages are focused on the keyword that i want to rank for and there for i do. Because of that and some good links i now sit in the #2 position in the SERP for my main keyword. This has brought a number of goodies. More natural links because other sites will like to the top couple of sites more often than a site on page 2 of the SERP.

Second i was recently reviewed and added to DMOZ. This had a unexpected result. What i didn’t understand is that there are a lot of Scraper sites out there that take the DMOZ results and add them to their sites. So I have found links to my site on a lot of these type of sites. I do get some traffice from DMOZ but i have yet to see any traffic from any of the scraper sites that have my link on them.

The addition of my site in DMOZ is most likely what moved me from #4 in the SERP to #3. This then brough me more natural links which then moved me up to #2 which again brought more natural links.

The same might be said for Yahoo Directory also if you want to pay for the listing.

So if you havent submited your site to DMOZ you need to put it on your list of things to do. I can directly relate my increase in traffic over the last three months to this. When i say increase in traffic i mean it has doubled twice over the last three months and is still growing. It could not have happened at a better time