Hey Damon,
I sent you an email with a couple of suggestions for your site, things I think may have possible slipped through the net during your redesign, I hope that helped!
Also, re: press releases, as someone that owns a Google news approved PR site, I can give you another angle on this if you like?
I agree with what everyone here has said about quality for a start! One of the more traditional uses of a press releases is obviosuly to get the word out... these days some folks try to submit crappy spun articles as press releases. A visit for somewhere like the warrior forums will show you people using, and selling, that tactic.
As a PR site owner that just means more work on our part, declining trash releases, and banning IP's from our system! Not everyone does this though, obviously the big sites do (prweb etc) but some of the smaller, free PR sites don't have much of an approval process.
What that can mean for you, is that you may end up with your news release on a site promoting questionable products and linking to questionable sites. Whilst I doubt this would be bad enough to cause you much harm, it may not be the panacea that you could be hoping for!
If you go down the PR site route on a regular basis, try to opt for sites that have some level of quality control, look for ones that are Google news approved, and also ones that will show your full contact details, ideally including a link back to your site.
Write decent releases, and when you write an especially good one, take it offline too! Send it to your local papers and press.
Regarding the local papers and press, if you want a higher success rate, pick up the phone, call the papers, and ask them who deals with small business news. Explain you have an interesting press release you would like to send them, and ask who the best person to send it to is.
Doing the above can help your success rate pretty massively, as instead of going to a generic, contact@blah type email, then having to be sent around the block, you should go straight to the eyes of someone that is most likely to be interested.
This is only worth doing if you have something to shout about. A relaunch MAY do it, winning some local award, or sponsoring a local charity or something almost certainly should! Look for local charity events to throw a few $ towards for sponsorship, offer a training day to local school kids, anything like that should be good enough to get the attention of the local press. If a reporter does interview you, explain that you would love a nice, clean SEO friendly link from the body of anything they publish online 
Give them lots of coffee, to keep em happy!
The effect on your local rankings, if you manage to get a clean link from a quality local paper and some follow up news coverage, may well help you to get above the spammy sounding guys above you.
Follow that up with some LOCAL (real local, not spammy ones) directory submissions, some 'social love' and some online press releases, and you may well secure a decent position in time.
Anyway that was a bit of a long un, but I wanted to give you an idea of how you could, pretty ethically, out do the guys above you, and also use online and offline PR the right way 
Obviously online PR gets used in all sorts of ways, and at the end of the day so long as what you submit is unqiue, well written and interesting, it should probably get approved, what I describe above is something that can give a nice bonus in addition, to help with your results (especially local ones), when you have a news worthy event to shout about.
