The client is the owner of the business. You are just the designer. You can make the site if it pays you. For you it's legal. For the site owner, this is not legal.
Some rumors suggest that Google passes some anchor text power to the linked pages. Matt Cutts said that is not true but I have some doubts if he said the truth.
You will not fond the links in this way. If the partner uses another keyword as anchor is impossible to find the link in this way. You must site:www.thenameofthesite.com in yahoo and to check the links.
The web directories are not very well viewed by Google. You must to obtain good power for your directory if you want yo have visitors on it. Do some link-building for the site.
The website is not looking very well. You have 2 H1 on a page - this is not really correct for SEO. I don't understand the site language and it's difficult to make a correct evaluation of your website.
Don't look at the PR. Try to update the info from site and put relevant links to the index and internal pages. It's better to update often your site. In this way the bot will come often on your website and the trust in the provided info / site will increase.
For design I use just Photoshop. Gimp is another good software. It's free but is not very easy to use, like Adobe Photoshop. Other interesting programs are Illustrator and Fireworks.
The Google Keyword Tool is not very accurate. You can try the SEOBook tool. It's free and it offers data from multiple other locations (Yahoo / Wordtracker / Google) in the same time.