please please help me with google places

first, let me make sure you know what i am talking about.
you know how when you google

chinese restaurant san francisco

and you get a bunch of results with letters inside a balloon
A
B
C
D

I believe that's called google places, right?

anyway, I am trying to become A or B. Right now I am not even G (it goes up to G for the keyword that I am targetting)

I understand in addition to backlinks, citations are also important. I have joined yelp, citysearch, yellowpages, etc. months ago and put my phone number and address there. but i have zero citations, while my competitors (the A and B guys) have like 70 citations.
I also made some web 2.0 blogs and put my address and phone number and business name and then built backlinks to them using SB. but nothing. zero citations.
I just dont know what to do at this point. Please help me, I want to be A or B. dammit.

Search member downloads for google places cheat sheet and/or places unleashed.

Read....... Understand...... then Act. If you don't understand then read again...

You don't mention that you have set up your Google Places page.

You need to set that up using your Google account and enter the address and phone numbers in exactly the same way as for the citation cites. Add all the details you can including categories and photos and video.

If there is no GP page yet it will take a couple of weeks to get set up.

In the meantime continue doing what you are doing with citations but you need to get others to leave reviews. Do what Geezer suggests and search in this forum and also look in the dedicated forum on here for "Offline Marketing".

Dupe post.

you need to optimize your place page with pictures and videos too. plus, get some reviews on the citations sites.

and do some onpage optimization,build more citations leave reviews on them,optimize your videos backlink to your gpl