Submitting to Directories

I have been conducting a flurry of activity submitting to various blog directories and search engines to improve my ranking. This is certainly a time consuming project! It is really hard to judge if some of these search engines are for real or if they are just a means of collecting email addresses? I am obviously fairly new at this and figure what the heck and give them an alternate email address. With the revolutions taking place in the blogging community optimizing SEO for SEO This is all to critical.