Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You might want to add Taxi Knutsford in as a meta keyword as well. Also, you haven't got any links with the anchor text 'Taxi Knutsford' linking to your desired landing page, just a couple both internally and externally could help up the ranking. There isn't any text I can see that directly says 'taxi knutsford'. There's plenty of text featuring the words knutsford and taxi separately, but these need to be placed together at some point to create a keyword match. Like Vitalscom says, you need to make better use of H1, as you currently don't have one. It also may help to make better use of the alt text in your pictures... slipping 'taxi knutsford' as an alt could help. You may also want to upload a sitemap. As well as adding to Google local, you may want to add the website listing to business sites such as 118 and Yell if not already done so.

I think that the number of links you're gaining might cause a problem, not to mention the quality of those links. Google assumes a natural pattern in link acquisition, so when you suddenly jump from 5 links per week to 500, that triggers a red flag because it doesn't appear natural. How many hours are you spending on this link directory? Perhaps you could take the same amount of time to write a well-researched guest post, or some other type of op-ed piece. That type of content is much more likely to earn the type of high quality targeted links you're looking for, without junking up your link profile.

I think in Danny Dover's book he suggests no more than 150.

idk if this would help, but Bing looks at Geo Meta Tags when Google does not (ie claims not to)

A similar thing happened to our sites a few months which was blamed on panda - our site shot completely down the rankings, but then came back a couple of weeks later in a better position.. only for it to then drop again! Have you added any new links or lost any good links recently or has your site gone down recently for any period of time? If G can't access your site when it tries to crawl or has slow load times it may be a contributor.

I believe, and have heard,  although i haven't proved it, that Google thinks of pdf's as technical content, which is very good for SEO. That said, its probably good to have a brief html text entry for the pdf, with a link to the pdf. That way you can summarize the content of the pdf, add value to the content of the page, make it relevant etc... But then perhaps you have to consider duplicate content. I believe you can add meta to the pdf if its editable that way, and consider if it is duplicate content, then make the html page meta canonical, and establish the pdf as the original.

ok I'll take your word for it and see how it goes.  Thanks for taking the time out to help out.

I think the canonical idea is better than blocking the pages all together. Depending on how the site is laid out you may try and make the pages more specific to location being talked about. Maybe adding header tags with the location information as well as adding that info to the page title and meta-description. If it is not too time consuming, I'd try and make those pages more unique especially since you might be getting searches based on a location. Location specific pages may help in that regard.

Here is another resource for you: Create XML Sitemap

Thanks for the responses. I'll try to get a hold of the htaccess file and setup a 301 redirect. Thanks again!

Just wanted to leave a quick note saying that SEOmoz has upgraded the Link Directory! You can view a post Cyrus wrote with more information at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices.

When did you implement the 301 redirect? I've seen it take a couple of months for some sites to regain its PageRank. As long as you follow the correct procedure (which it seems like you have) then you should be okay. Another thing you might wish to consider is to change the links from pointing to your old site to link to your new site.

I tried multiple configurations of what you said with replacing ##caturl## but I think I botched it in the end, if you could help me a bit more.

I think the toolbar shows total links where as the summary in ose shows followed only.

meta-keywords and description don't count towards the content on your website, based on whatever I've read, but the description is extremely valuable in getting people to click.  Alt tags do have some influence, but make sure the alt tag is for the user, and not just for the search engines.  Here's what SeoMoz says about description tags: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

OK thanks

Well... Of Course there are some world-class sites better ranked than us and that's fair. But I think we're not at the right place... Proximeety is 7 years old... There are websites before us that are really younger, with very less backlinks, with far less content, far less members, etc... That's why we really thnik that there must be a mistake on Proximeety which penalize us... Of course we'd like to hire a SEO in France, but it's hard to find the good person... We don't want a SEO who will explain us that we need to optimize our title or obvious things like that...