What query are you searching for? The website comes up fine for me.

That's very frustrating! I've never had a problem with HMA specifically, but that script usually works.

You may want to try searching for things like "break out of frame proxy" or "break out of frame php" to see if anyone out there has come up with a better solution.

Trading links with other quality sites in your niche is a great way to get links. Just make sure the sites you're linking to are high quality (not spammy, have pagerank, aren't using shady link tactics). A quick backlink check of the sites using OSE or Majestic is probably a good idea.

I usually like to put together a "Partners" or "Resources" page where I add all the links from people I trade with:

http://www.salsabythebay.com/resources/

Hopefully you can use the initial link exchange to begin a relationship with some of the other players in your niche, so you can collaborate on other projects too, like guest posting, interviews, etc.

You are definitely missing out on image traffic by not hosting your own images. Plus, hotlinking is poor netiquette since you are using someone else's bandwidth without their permission. If the images are copyrighted, then you could be hit by DMCA requests which can negatively impact your SEO.