Paul,

Search engines continually change their rating schemes. It appears that in early 2008, Google (and Yahoo and others) have changed their methods somewhat. It used to be that your ranking solely depended on how close your address was to the center of the geography you chose. More recently, it appears that the ranking, while still heavily weighted by the geographical basis, is also marginally affected by number of pages that have links to the business' site (obviously having a website is important to the ranking - the links can be from Yellow Pages, etc), reviews, title, category, and traditional SEO criteria. Here's a study on this done in July.

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2008/08/04/ranking-factors-in-google-maps-crack...

While there doesn't appear to be a way to "buy" your way into higher rankings for the local pages, Adworks and other pay-per-click allow you to be beside the maps category as a sponsored link. If you pick a zip code, it's not so clear how to get that sponsored link on top.

I hope this helps.

Wayde

This blog article about free local listings on Google gives you step by step instructions on how to get your company listed in Google local results. Just getting listed is not a guarantee of showing up on the first page, but if you are not listed, you will never show up at all.

The hint in the following article states that a higher ranking by local listing may be possible by # of reviews:
http://www.tastyplacement.com/how-does-google-local-order-its-results

Submit to google local (do the other search engines as well). Know your best keyword phrases and add them to the account.

Have your address and phone number within html of site. Include the towns/areas you serve.

Implement search engine optimization tactics including the addition of backlinks.

Sorry for the quick answers - finishing up big project.

Best,

Greg

Thank you for this great question and great answers :)

For me, this is exactly what marketingprofs is for.

I learned some great new stuff from this.

Thank you to all for the advise.

Matthew

Hi

Adding an image of your business location with the file name containing your postal code will also help.

Adding a footer of your business address in html in all of your website pages can also contribute to higher listing in the local search.

Add your business address and postal code as a title in your contact page and business location.

The more cross references you are able to make internally to your site and externally from other websites will give you a better chance in achieving a higher spot but there are no general hard or fast rules, as others have said, the goal posts do change quite often.

Hope this helps.

Zahid Adil

You list this as an 'urgent' question needing immediate response (and I'm assuming result).

If urgency is the issue, seems to me you need to focus on SEM (Adwords) rather than SEO. SEO will take weeks or months to show results (depending on your category and skills), SEM will get you clicks today.