What I've noticed with social signals is that if a post gets lots of attention (shares, likes etc) then it seems to get a significant boost in the rankings but then this seems to drop back to original position once social activity stops meaning it is more temporary.
So I'm guessing that either it needs to continue to receive social attention or that you have to continually pump out content that gets social attention to lift the whole site up on a more permanent basis (as it indicates that you are continually producing good content)
Just my thoughts and observations but as we know things are changing quite a lot at present
There's a great video on this topic here:
senuke .com/blog/?p=308
Yes I know this video is from automated link building software creators but it contains some great points based on actual testing. I'm not going to type it all out - just watch it.
Niche directory list:
directorycritic. com/niche-directories.html
PR directory list:
strongestlinks .com/directories.php
40k directories:
list-directories. com
Also the PR that you see is outdated anyway so bear that in mind - think its a couple months if I remember rightly before its updated again. Check out the Mozrank too which is from SEOmoz.
Generally getting links from high PR sites back to your site will hlep increase PR.
Other possible things are age of site, indexed pages and ages of these pages, fresh content added to the site regularly and more.
The other one worth mentioning is the Yahoo directory which you can pay to be listed in
DMOZ is or was considered the main and most important directory to be listed in and have a link to your website from.
There is debate as to how effective it still is to be listed there but it's definitely not a bad thing.
DMOZ however manually approves it's thousands of submissions and there are not many human staff reviewers so people wait months or years and sometimes never even get listed.
As well as the fake news type blog sites ("flogs!" haha) there are the countless fake review sites providing made up ratings of anything from hoovers to genital wart treatments.
You can generally spot them a mile off compared to real or at least honest review sites but they obvisouly work in conning some people otherwise there wouldn't be so many of them I guess. I do think people are getting a bit more wise though now which is forcing website owners to provide better content but there is still a long way to go.
I think the title is the one of the most important aspects to your page. It should contain a hook that your target visitor can identify with which will make them read the next line down which could be a sub headline or your intro.
They can leave at any point so like the post said above. Split testing and heatmap testing can work wonders. Split test 1 thing at a time and only make small changes then analyze and repeat until that part is golden then move onto another part.
Some software can heatmap test your page to see at which point the visitor leaves the page. This can be really useful to pinpoint any points in your copy that are making visitors lose interest - then split test tweaking this bit until it works better.
. . . But the title is what will more often than not keep them on the page and get them to start to read/scan your page
