Do I need adwords google to rank highly?

Hi everyone...I have managed to get myself on google maps and some various free advertising places, but I am still hard to find..I was looking at adwords but you have to pay,,I dont think it's alot,,But is there any alternative? I appreciate your help people,,I feel so comp illiterate with this stuff.

I did adwords for 3 months - at their lowest amount available.
It does put you at the top of the page..... but it's in the sponsered link space.... I don't know about anyone else but I tend to skip over those links and scan down the page....... also you have to monitor it constantly to see if your showing up where you should be and that your keywords are working for blah blah... I did get more calls for work but it didn't equate into more work... I just got a lot of calls becuase the listing had my phone number and they hadn't othered to click through to my site so they were ringing for prices and trying to bargain me down..... it really gave me the sh*ts. I just canceled it as I have plenty of work.
If my work dropped off again I would consider doing it again - but it was more moeny then I wanted to pay - like $300 for 3 months.... not really inour advertising budget.
You need to make sure you have Meta Tags embedded in your site so google can find it and list it properly - and you need to make regular updates to the pics and to the wording so it seems fresh or google will push it down in ranking.
Hope this helps

That reminds me... time to refresh my own site! Thanks for that kick in the pants.

Thanks Tash..I'll check out my meta tags!!

This just killed my dreams, I was hoping I could finish my site and rarely have to update it so much to do , so little time it seems.

if you don't update your site often, it won't rank well ... part of the ranking programming has to do with the frequency of updates and how recent the material is.

As far as adwords, I have mine set at a maximum of $75 per month and it has definitely turned into more bookings. But you don't have to start with it... I'm not an expert on the topic, but here's something I wrote up on my experiences http://perrynoia.blogspot.com/2011/06/helping-your-search-results-freely-or.html

I have pretty good ranking through some of the free sites but what was funny is that my facebook page has the best ranking of them all pg. 2 ..... won't be long til I hit pg. 1

On the google listing I am in the top 5

No ... you definately don't need Adwords to get top ranking ..... all you need to do is to be the BEST site for whatever search terms your ideal customers are using to look for someone like you.

To do that ... know what search terms to use, maximize your page(s) around that with off-page and on-page strategies (url, content, meta tags, inbound links, intrnal links etc).

There is no reason at all that you shouldn't show high on the first page of Google, MSN, Yahoo etc for your market.

John