Quality of backlinks - your opinion about their location

[peterko]

What do you guys think about choosing websites you want to create backlink with? Do you prefer backlinks from the relevant sites or web directories?

I'm raising those questions because it seams to me web directories don't give that much quality of backlinks as the relevant ones.
My site is a shopping site, specializing on promotional codes for the brand name clothes. I found it's not easy to make good link exchange with the similar shopping sites, but if I get some good one, I notice my targeted traffic increases a lot. At the same time web directories don't give me much traffic at all, at least I don't see it.

Wondering, what's your opinion about backlinks, where to get them from - relevant or web directories, or you think the main idea is to get as much links as possible, no matter where they're comming from?

Have a great day

[briscoe.reich]

A link is a link - go for the relevant links it gives more weight than those from directories.

[Henry Andersson]

As a general rule relevance always come first. But of course I would prefer a backlink from apple.com that is totally unrelated to my site's topic thatìn a link from a pr1 site that is very much related.