Forcing a re-crawl on a specific page

I have one page on a client's site that just will not seem to catch up with the rest, sod's law dictates it's the page containing their number one target area.

I have checked all the internal site links in case it has been accidentally orphaned, I've resubmitted the sitemap, wrote some external content pointing at it, social bookmarked it....am I missing anything obvious?

I'm sure I'm being a dullard there's no other reason for it to have such an old version cached.

Any ideas gratefully received.

Is it a newish site? Also does the page in question get updated as often as the rest of the site?

Yes and Yes....it's really very annoying.

Have you built any links into that specific page?

Yeah, I've started doing it as soon as I realised the problem. I'll just have to keep plugging away I suppose. It's like a millstone dragging down the rest of the SEO effort though.

With our site being new Google will probably spider it better as time goes by and it becomes clear which are the important pages as links are built and pages are updated.

Its not what you want to hear but I think you have to just be patient and carry on doing what you are doing. I'm not an expert on sitemaps so I don't know how much of an affect setting the priority of the page higher in the xml sitemap but it might be worth a try.

I had a big problem with a site which had been redirected from the old domain with a 302 (nowt to do with me!), google indexed some of the site and put a very random page in the serps instead of the homepage, an xml sitemap fixed it, but you go on Google's terms, when it decides to re-index

It may take some time for the Google cache in SERPs to catch up, even after the page has been crawled and indexed.

For example, I noticed today that an updated version of my main page has been indexed:
- file size in the SERPs has changed
- a search on a phrase that is present only in the latest page version now shows in the Google snippet results
- page now ranks differently in the results after new indexing

But bringing up the cache still shows previous version cached.

It could take a week or even several weeks to flush out older versions in cache. Or do you know from server logs that Google hasn't even crawled the page?