Ranking my site for a local keyword

[eook.joc]

Hi all,
First of all, this is my first post here. I am looking for a good SEO forum and this seems to be worth a try.

I have a mission to accomplish. What i would like to do is rank one of my sites for a keyword, "(mytown) restaurants". MYTOWN has a small population of 20,000 people but it is still desirable to be first in google for this keyword of-course. I was thinking because there would be such low competition that it would be a decently easy keyword to rank but I am trying to figure out a method to use for this.

In this case, my website is not a business and therefore does not belong to Google places, but for this keyword GP results are displayed. I would need to outrank these and I was wondering if this is a difficult task to accomplish with a non GP page. Using Market Samurai I know the top place page I am ranking against is listed in the Yahoo directory, the DMZ directory and is optimized towards the keyword other than in the URL. They have 400,000 backlinks to their domain but only 30 Backlinks to their page. They are not a GP page either.

So I was wondering if I optimized my site towards this keyword, what would be the best way to start building backlinks to this page to outrank my competition. I was advised not to buy a link building package from twitter as they can be portrayed of as spammy links, but I did run over a service the other day called backlinks genie and was wondering if these would have the same effect. Since it is more of a local result I am sensing that it is quite a bit different from ranking your ordinary page for something like a Micro Niche. I would prefer to outsource the link building for a cheap price.