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Just after a cursory glance at your site, I noticed that your load times are horrible. So I ran a test at webpagetest.org and your load time is 11.3 seconds.  You probably don't see that because your browser has a cached version of your website since you've visited it repeatedly.  However, Google is grading you based upon a load time of 11.3s.

See here for the results of your website:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121228_X3_AGM/ 

Then see here for why that is negatively affecting you:
http://www.socialdesignstudios.com/webpage-speed/ 

Some other points:

1. Add rel=author
2. Start driving a social media campaign (it will help you in the SERPs as well as your audience particularly loves it)
3. Offer a scholarship (see here - point D)
4. Create a Meetup, link it to your page and get a Bootcamp going... Meetup.com will provide great referral traffic as well as clients.
5. Run your site through an HTML/CSS validator to make sure you're not getting held up by simple corrections. 
6. Create some "big content" and then push it to your distribution channels to get some good backlinks.

At the end of the day you have to remember that you've only had the domain for 4 months and only have a PR1 rating.   But whatever you do... don't focus on directory submissions. It'll end up biting you in the end.

Best of luck!

Remember, going from PR2 to PR3 is about twice as hard as going from PR1 to PR2.  So there is no "X number of links will get you to the next pagerank level" because each is uniquely harder than the previous.

That said, I have a 8 month old domain name that has maybe 15 external backlinks from PR0-PR3 sites... that domain is currently PR3.  However, I have a 2 year old domain with maybe 200 backlinks from PR0-PR6 sites yet is only has a pagerank of PR2.

Honestly, social engagement does so much more as well as great content.  Plus, find some killer untapped keywords and rank well for them. My 8 month old PR3 site is generating revenue for me yet my 2 year old PR2 site isn't... and its all because of keyword research and rankings.

Hi Daniel,

While 11.3s is bad, I had a client who had 14.x seconds and when it was all said and done we were able to get him down to 0.86s on average.

You bet there is a quick way to speed up your website.  And you're in luck since you are running WordPress... go install the free plugin W3 Total Cache (W3tc).  There are others... don't use them.  W3tc is by far the best, albeit it can be a little complicated at first blush.

To overcome the complications, either hire a pro to set it up for you (around $250) or go to gtmetrix.com and do a test on your site.  Keep in mind that GTmetrix will always understate your load times so only use webpagetest.org or pingdom for getting an accurate result.

Once you have the results, scroll down to the tab labeled "Page Speed" and you will see where it says "recommendations." When I run a test on your website the #1 thing it shows to fix first is combining your images using CSS sprites.  That might be a little hard unless you've done it before so I would skip it and go to "leverage browser caching".  Click on it and it will drop down and tell you what you need to do and what are the problem pages.  In this case, you need to specify browser caching of at least one week.  So now go to your website and to the W3tc plugin you just installed and look for the browser caching setting... if I remember correctly it is in the general settings but I could be wrong. I believe you'll have to set it in seconds.

Then do that for the rest of the items on the GTMetrix report.

Once you are done with that, go install Yahoo's SmushIt plugin for Wordpress. Then navigate to it a do the bulk smushit... part of the problem is just the fact that your page size is almost 2MB... mainly because of photos.  Once you run the smushit plugin, your page size will be more around 500KB.  That's still about 5 times what it should be so you should really take advantage of CDNs (W3tc will help with that) and maybe hosting all your images on a subdomain so that you can take advantage of HTTP's ability to load from multiple resources at once.

Last thing, in the future, when you upload photos to your website, make sure that you are uploading in a size that is just the right fit.  WP will allow you to upload a photo with sizes up to 2MB and then will resize for content but you'll still be loading the full size in the background... thus killing your load times.  And if you have the option, choose JPG over PNG as it compresses better... unless you need the alpha channel.

Be on the lookout... I hope to be posting an article to SEOMoz's UGC blog that covers all this in more detail soon.

Best of luck!