meta tags are hardly used by google, if ever used any more as they were spammed too much and became pointless. as someone said other search engines may still use them but it's becoming less and less, and really is the least important part of a page any way.
submitting a sitemap to google doesn't help seo one bit, it just helps big sites be read better by google so they don't miss a page that isn't linked to very well. not really worth the time if your site is 4/5 pages.
You should then be one the first rung of the ladder.
if it was that easy everyone would be doing it (which they did but many years ago) so it's no longer just a case of do a couple of things and that's it, unless you have an uncompetitive keyword and location, but something like carpet cleaning in london will take a lot of time to get it up there.
best things to do imo that you can do right now are:
improve title tag to include your location, but don't over use this, e.g. don't put carpet cleaning in guildford, woking, farnrbough, aldershot, godalming, hook, south london, north london, east london, west london, surrey, uk.
have a good amount of words for your location and don't forge the towns around your main one, e.g. i'm in guildford, but i try to have the keywords woking, godalming, farnham etc around the place so we are relevant to those towns.
don't do anything that seems un-natural. peopel say link swap, but for what reason? it's only to increase seo, so why would google like that? they want better information for their users, not higher results for the websites they link to..
then you need to get links, and lots of them. you'll need to have a presence on the internet and get links with the anchor text as your keywords, e.g.
guildford cleaners, and the links need to be on sites that are indexed by google (this forum afaik is not as you have to sign up to view it, so links on this site are pointless) and links that aren't set to nofollow (very important)
can post more later but it's diner time. hope this helps
