Hey Mike,
Not a bad start, nor a bad idea. I would drop the "Pay me $5 for the link," though. It really sounds like you're doing something underhanded. I would seek out alternative ways to market the site and pull some revenue. It looks like you have Ad-Sense or something similar running already. As long as you're bringing people in, you'll make a few bucks off the click-throughs.
My advice for getting people to stay is to bring a forum into the website. I use phpBB on a website I started recently (http://whoarethedead.com/), and it's about as easy as it gets. Boards are a great way to give people a fun distraction while they're at the site. For your purposes (community building, I presume), it would seem almost essential. PhpBB has plenty of free tutorials, templates, a massive community and easy session integration, which allows for some cool things. Dealing with spam bots takes a little work, but google has plenty of help (though you might want to keep them. Sometimes they're hilarious). FTP it over to your web host and go through the install.php script to get it going. It's mostly point-and-click (your web host does have PHP on board, right?).
I peeked through some of the source on the pages. There are a TON of lines dedicated to style. Have you considered referencing a style sheet? You can do a lot with CSS, and it's a massive time saver for changes across multiple pages. I didn't use a CMS for my site (addicted to rolling my own) and found that formatting with style sheets is actually pretty easy. You can check out mine if you want an example of what they look like http://whoarethedead.com/WATD.css. Basically, I define classes in CSS and then identify <div> blocks with those classes. Ultimately, it's the same as what most toolkits would do. As long as you have a good reference guide, you should be able to do just about anything.
And my (from limited experience) SEO info-nuggets:
1- Good tags, clear formatting, etc. are nice, but they guarantee nothing.
2- Without regularly updated content, you'll get deindexed. Heed the words of E-40 and Scrape! Scrape! Scrape!
3- Back-links. Get them. Do whatever it takes that is still cost-effective.
4- Rate of change in traffic is more important than total rate (think trending).
Probably not as tasty as chicken-nuggets, but born from experience. If you get the first 3 locked in, you might look into traffic sharing, buying out competing niche-sites and such. Good luck!