What good properties to use for dominating the SERPs

what are some good properties that i can use to build links to and own the front page?

Despite PR being slated by idiots who say 'PR useless blah blah', although it doesn't often update enough IMO, it's still a good metric to be used to find authority sites which have many links pointing to them, I know Angela's and Paul's PDF provide mostly do-follow high PR sites where you can include your link, however these are grossly overused and I wouldn't recommend it. It's a trivial task to find high PR related sites simply by searching for specific CMS's for example + keyword in G.