Yes, a blog is an important tool. I have one as well and I blog about my events and other things when I have time. H1 tags are also important.
But more important than those to the search engines is content. Th reason why the blogs are getting attention from Google right now is that their content is changing on a regular basis. That can be done with any page, not just a Word Press blog.
I try to change the content of my pages on a regular basis. If you want SEO to work you need to keep the content fresh.
Oh, and I wouldn't call Attractica Crap. Once a week it crawls my site, updates the sitemap, and updates the site map with Google, Yahoo, and Bing. These three search engines notice the changing content based on the sitemap and reindex the site.