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Matt Cutts once said that "A" link can not hurt your ranking. What he didn't say was your link profile, or a bunch of links can not hurt your ranking. Here is a good older discussion on this from Q.A. http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/37193/are-paid-links-from-prsites-and-directories-bad There are valuable directories. You have to be pretty picky. There are a lot of posts and training on this in the site. Picking up a DMOZ listing and Yahoo directory are great (as noted).  I think one thing you want to watch is the c-blocks they are on.  One directory company may have 100's of sites on a c-clock, and this can harm your trust ranking. Long story short,  make your link profile as natural as you can.  Paid directories can fit into that, as well as blogs, forums, press releases, no follow and follow links. But do try and go for quality at all times.

You can also see how much of your desired content Google is indexing. in Google Webmaster Tools, you can see that you've submitted 65 pages and 45 pages of those are indexed. You still need to figure out for yourself which are those 20 pages, but you know that there are some things not being indexed.

Both www.cardealer.net and www.car-dealer.com will lose type-in traffic to www.cardealer.com. I would find another domain that is a .com without a hyphen. After you have put a lot of work into the site you don't want your traffic going to the competitor.

Brant, I agree with John and would even take it a step further; Create landing pages with your desired phrase in the text, alt tag behind the image AND Link to newly created internal pages with phrases 2 OR 3 (not both on each page) to create a further, in-depth, trail for Google to rank you for.

You can start by claiming & completing your listing. Make sure that it is complete, with a good description, images, special offer, relevant categories, etc. Next, start compiling citations. I like Whitespark's Local Citation Finder - http://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/. He's a fellow Mozer too! Make sure to be consistent with how you list your business. I'd recommend reading http://www.davidmihm.com/. David Milhm's site offers some great insight to local search. Also, take a look at the sites that have high visibility. What citations do they have? How many reviews, what does their profile look like? Good luck! LHC

Thanks Ryan for your help! A lot of good ideas that I will definitely be implementing.

Have you tried the SEOmoz On-Page Keyword Optimization Tool? You can test your page for all of these terms and get optimization suggestions. I would probably start with that and experiment.