ilovedesignweb

No.1 is better but both of their structure are too simple, are they homepage?

Really nice design! The classic white-black color selection and beautiful drop-down. But I think the social media icons are not so perfect to put there. Why don't you just put them on footer?

The best way to make sure you images are helping your SEO is to first name them correctly and to make sure you have your key words included in the image title tag. Remember that the alt tag for the image was create to help people with disabilitys so finish your alt tag text with a full stop then a space, as this will help people with text readers. Title tags do help with SEO but you have to make sure the keywords in them are relevant to the image subject matter. Hope this helps.

At this time content marketing techniques are more usefull than link exchanges.You can go for article submissions, PR distribution and guest blogging for building good quality links.Bulk directory submissions are not worthy, only high quality good PR directories are beneficial.

Neither, it's the content that matters. Have relevant content and you will display higher.
 
Also backlinks are to do with quality rather than quantity, 10 links from other "professional web design" websites are loads better than 1000 links from a football website.
 
Domain age will be factored in due to it having lots of relevant links and Google can recognise that it is an established website. Using the right content, and the right backlinks will improve your rankings.