Keeping the listener interested in you song is a tricky thing, especially these days when everything is so immediate. Some listeners only give you a few seconds of their time, an you have to convince them that it's worth hanging on, but how do you keep 'em listening?
Jerry Coker (Author of "Improvising Jazz" - a great book btw) explains that if what you play is 50% predictable then you're on the right track, what he means is that if they are more than 50% predictable then the audience can guess what's coming and they'll go off for a pint, but if it's less than 50% predictable then they ain't got a clue what's coming next and go lukewarm pretty quickly (like me at the Eberhard Weber gig in Basildon one rainy November evening)
Anyway...It's very common to have guitars sounding the same all the way through a rock song, this tends to make the piece sound flat and predictable, and it's necessarily fixed by adding hooks and solos and stuff, it can be more subtle than that, if possible use a different guitar on the Left track to the Right, if doubling rock guitars, a Telecaster L and a Les Paul R, stick em through the same amp sim, especially if they are playing the same riff, that works well, if the amp sim is so different each side that can sound distracting. An alternative is putting the same guitar through 2 different amps, I've found that the same guitar through the same amp using different pickups doesn't work too well.
Distorted guitars are hot and chunky but can muddy the backdrop, so wind em back a tad and use a sub mix buss to gauge the level very carefully, maybe put a parametric eq, with rolling off the muddy frequencies over the submix buss channel, it might sound very odd as a submix, but it'll sound better when the drums and bass are using those bass frequencies.
As for maintaining interest of guitars in solos, the de facto approach is to add reverb and delay, and in the 80's, Chorus and flange. I'm going through a phase (no pun intended) of using a tremolo effect where I would have maybe used a searing Lead Solo, seems to create some nice tension.
Anyway, just a few pointers, hope they help someone.
Rich