According to Matt Cutts, leader of the anti-web spam team at Google, there are well over 100 factors that affect search engine ranking. But, as I can tell you, there are just a handful of factors which have the strongest impact on rankings. Most of those you have control over as webmaster. Allow me to give you some solid direction.
1) Every web page should have a descriptive Title Tag and Meta Description which must be unique. This will help prevent duplicate content which can slowly kill you in Google. Most webmasters think duplicate content comes OUTSIDE of their domain from articles and content being replicated on other domains. No. It mainly comes from internal pages and Google’s PERCEPTION of duplicate pages, which mostly comes from … duplicate Title tags.
2) Make good use of H1 and H2 tags (heading tags) to use for your Headlines and Sub-Headlines. Keyword phrases can be used here, but you are better off focusing on effective headings like an ad.
3) If you have a dynamic site, make sure you are using Mod_Rewrite in order to feed search engine friendly URLs to the browser so Google doesn’t “choke” on your database code.
4) If you are using Session IDs (SIDs) make sure you shut off SIDs if GoogleBot is detected. This way you won’t give Google the same page over and over again causing endless spider traps.
5) Use hyphens instead of underscores in your filenames. This will allow for you to get a slight advantage over your competitors.
6) If you have a Google Webmaster account, and an XML Sitemap, you don’t need to worry about having a “shallow” site structure, you can go as deep as you wish knowing that the sitemap will allow all of your pages to be crawled.
7) Don’t link to bad neighborhoods – you know who they are.
Start a blog, or POST to your blog 2-4 times per week. Just make sure you include Google in your pinging list.
9) Target keyword phrases that currently sell on your site. If you don’t know – find out.
10) Get more tips and help from Jerry West’s Free Webmaster Tip Sheet.
The main reason I started the SEO Revolution was out of frustration. Frustration at all of the lies and misconceptions that are posted in forums, given as advice in teleconferences, and even taught in live workshops. "So why didn't all of this work?" " Why wasn't my site successful?" " Why am I still stuck in a rut?" 
Hi John,
What are the main benefits that would be received from being included in your directory? While I see the cache dates are fairly recent, it just looks like another scrapped directory.
How do you know if a site is “bad”? This is my big concern, because my site has a zero PR, and I dont know why, I’m thinking it’s due to a bad link somewhere?
“Bad” is the same as “Quality” – you are the judge of that. PR0 isn’t due to a bad link, but lack of quality links.
I think it would be much better if you’ll do some research about the company and if you think it is a reputable one, see if you can build a good relationship with it and possibly ask them to add a link of your site vice-versa creating back links for both sites.