The fight continues to get my web site noticed...

So my Alexa rank has improved almost 2 million..so I must be doing something right. Still nothing from Google, but its like being a flea on the back of a huge gorilla! I continue to register with directories, seem to be no end to them...hundreds and hundreds of them.
Something else I'm finding adds to your visibility is to post in forums. Apparently the SE's see them as quality links, I've only posted in a few and several SE's have taken notice, most notably Yahoo and Ask Jeeves.
Unfortunately, due to the nature of the business I'm in the "bounce rate" is rather high. I'm not positive if that' s strictly a Google term but what it means is, OK..you've gotten a visitor to your site..do they explore the site or just bounce off to something else. I'm hovering somewhere between 46 and 100% which means less than half the folks that find me find it interesting enough to explore beyond the first page. So what I've done is take the content from another page further into the site and moved it to the first page..actually it's allot of my musings that you're looking at right now. My reasoning is that while this blog is a great thing, many people may not do the blog thing, but I still feel what I have to say is relevant and adds to the quality of the content of my main web page. Of course, that's yet to be seen.
I have been reading a great deal on optimization techniques and went thru my main page step by step and adjusted things per the research that I found. That alone is what I credit my Alexa ranking improvement to..after following the advice I found and implementing it to the web site, my Alexa score rose immediately! Format and word placement counts!! Who knew!
Something else I'm having a problem with and I hope if SOMEONE reads this maybe they could shed some light on it..but I am using "XHTML Transitional" and any, and I mean any, scripts I add from advertisers or banner sharing folks causes my W3C validation to go right out the window! I had to change from "Strict" because it was just too difficult to get everyone to play together nicely. Disappointing since I had gone to such great lengths to make sure it was compliant. Suggestions welcome!

Oh and by the way...if anyone would like to brain storm on SEO stuff I am definitely open to that kind of collaboration. And linking each others sites couldn't hurt either!!