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Interesting post.
I have just Googled 'Garde design Hull' on Google.com and David Beasley came up as the second on the Google map list and second on the organic search page for your Blogspot. Your LJN page came up fourth - not a bad result ;-0)
when I did Google.co.uk you came second in the map and your LJN page came six in organic results.
Use your blog to draw in new title searches - pay particular attention to keywords.
You are right to explore other means of advertising.
One of the best directories we have signed into has been Green Pages , which of course are for sustainable practices but really propelled us up to the top of listings for all search engines. With Google Maps we have found that editing regularly keeps you high up, in this case it has become an obsession almost as another company completely usurped us, stole our client list when part of CSL whilst all the time building up their own business, and now it is battle front for us on the google listings.
I know what you mean about Google Map pages. A couple of months back when you typed in 'garden design hull' into Google it came up with a map and about 10 companies (including mine). Then all of a sudden the same search produced only one company (not mine) with their own dedicated map! If you did the same for 'Garden Design Leeds' the map was regional with 10 companies.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I've recently tweaked my listing and all of a sudden the 10 company map has sprung up again with me at no. 2.
The company at no. 1 never appears to update their website, have no blog or post on Social Networking Sites like me so I am very suspicious of how their listing appears top. I sounds like a sneaky 'paid' listing to me!
Now I never update my website, have no links or anything but I still rank second or third on google, god knows how.......I think 123reg submit your website to all of the major search engines every month as part of the website subscription. If I get a little quiet, I just put the google ad words on again for a few weeks and the phone rings off the hook. I have never bothered with Yahoo, I think they rely on you having in-coming links from other websites, which as a little one-man-band jobbing gardener I cannot really see how you can do that.
So concentrate on Bing and don't worry aboutYahoo. Tip if you do wish to rank in Yahoo in the meantime, optimise for Google and your Yahoo ranking should be just fine. As far as I know Yahoo does still use Meta keywords as part of its algo.
Beware of using "hidden" keywords as Steven has posted above, this is an old trick and still works, however, if one of Steven's competitors files a spam report, his site will get nuked and never return in the SEPR's. There are far better tricks if the market is very competitive.