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Chris, Thank so much for the great tips. I didn't quite understood how will I be able to create a new listing and have it up and runing in days with google having to mail us a postcard, etc. Can you please explain how should I do this? Also, regarding the domain email. Do you mean Mydomain@gmail.com as the account the listing is on? Or info@mydomain.com as the contact email on the listing?

I just wanted to get other SEOs opinion about Localeze.com (Local Directory submission tool) recommended at; http://getlisted.org/enhanced-business-listings.aspx . We paid $3500 to use their system, entered few companies to test. We were very careful to enter proper and recommended NAP and categories. After 5 months, we checked 100 + directories they claim that the listing data would be sent. However only 5% of the places showed our listing. Has anyone used Localeze services? what are your experiences? We feel like we wasted our time and money usin Localeze services.

To be fair, your site isn't really overly slow. www.appliance-repair-ny.com loads in an average of 3.9 seconds and is 194kb www.all-appliance-repair-ny.com loads in an average of 5.6 seconds and is 327kb www.newyorkappliancerepair.net loads in an average of 1.5 seconds and is 115kb And I think that's from Sweden. Your server is in Arizona so will be quicker from NY. You could gzip your css, but it's not going to really give you a big improvement. Yes, shared hosting will always be slower than a dedicated server but for the cost I don't think it will be worth going for a dedicated server and CDN delivery. If you really wanted to track it you could add webmaster tools and (do you not have analytics on the page?) _gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']); into your Google Analytics. This would let you see what times Google thought your page was loading in. Speed is unlikely to be a defining ranking factor for you and you should concentrate your efforts more on acquiring links, reviews, and local optimisation.

I am often amazed at the rankings that can be obtained from only a few good links.

You should not be overly worried about your rankings, especially in the short term. Just write great content which users will love and you will see the website come up on searches again. All said, keep an eye on your Google webmaster tools. If your website has been penalized for some reason, Google execs maybe kind enough to let you know about that. SEOmoz tools should give you a good idea on crawl errors and on page metrics so that you can keep a close look at them.

Do you know if Google is counting the reviews based on their IP address? Most of my competitor have fake reviews and I suspect they use their own computers to do that.

It all make sense but let look at one more new york appliance repair . com also using the same technicque in over 30 cities all by liking all on same ip. If you look at the competitors for example appliance - repair - ny . com that has almost 3000 links from different ips get lower rankings.. I'm looking on a way to dominate this niche in any cities and played with the idea but it seems like it too easy if that all that it took them to take over those niches.