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Curious if anyone has some good examples of ways to organize your WordPress tags without making your sidebar a football field long and hard to navigate. My blog is https://karmahill.com/blog and I could use some ideas.

We have main categories of photo shoot types, for example, "Couples", located on the sidebar.

We want to add tags to go with those main categories for further categorization and user experience example:

• Couples

• Engagement

• Proposals

• Honeymoon

• Maternity

My question is, do I need to make "tag" pages for those posts to reside on or is their another way to get it done with less work, that is much faster? I don't want to have to make 30 tag pages or is that just what you have to do?

Just wanted to share some information that HTTPS is now a positive ranking factor.

Here is an article about the fact that it can give a small boost in Rankings: http://searchengineland.com/explainer-googles-new-ssl-https-ranking-factor-works-200492

Here is also a video by Google Saying they think "every site should have a security certificate" and how to employ it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBhZ6S0PFCY

People may already know about this; just thought it was important to share and couldn't find it thoroughly addressed anywhere on the site.

Are you building links to authority sites in your niche? Spreading any content outside of your blog and your Sprout Social auto posting?

Need more info into what you are currently doing off page and what niche your in before I can craft any ideas.

Have you read this post yet? Sounds like what happened to eBay is much like what happened to you. You may want to keep up with what eBay will do to rebound and take cues from that going forward. Just a thought.

Panda 4.0, Payday Loan 2.0 & eBay's Very Bad Day

http://moz.com/blog/panda-4-payday-loan-2-and-ebays-very-bad-day?utm_source=sendgrid&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=top10

One thing I would add is a "Book Services" button or "Request a Quote".

I have used this technique on tons of my sites with amazing success. It allows people to feel like they are actually buying something and it takes people from "information requesters" (contact us) to buyers faster. Most sites I create I let them buy right there. But your situation is a little different as you need to give a bid. People want immediate gratification, buy now!!! Let them give you all the info right away if they will.

For the booking page/request a quote page:

Make check boxes for what people want:

-Web Design

-Logo Design

-Graphic design

Make a place for them to upload suggestions or urls of sites they like or Pinterest pins for logo designs. All the things you need to make your life easier. Or that you already request. You can actually use it for every client, so you have a run down of just what they want. Refine it as you find out just what people want from the form.

It just takes the customer into your process faster and helps skip steps.

Also, I noticed on your navigation you should lump service types together. It is to much to look at quickly and immediately makes me want to look away.

I would use something more like (most popular first):

Design Services:

• Graphic Design
• Logo Design
• Web Design

Marketing Services:

• content writing
• social media marketing

You get the idea (with a bread crumb trail or hover to show other services). I know you may have put them all on the same services tab because of indexing, but they will all get indexed. Once indexed, the 'child pages' pages will make the 'parent page' Stronger.

Example:

Parent: Design Services

Child: Graphic Design -Logo Design-Web Design

The child pages are going to help build more relevance for your page "Design Services" because of your great "Child page" references about different kinds of design.

Hope that helps.

Visually it looks great!

You are not alone. We have a wedding and photography business and Yelp constantly hides our reviews as well, all real customers. Just focus on Google or whatever platform your customer base uses most. They have been doing this for years so don't feel singled out.

I was thinking a good experiment to do on yelp would be to advertise on there and see how many reviews, that are currently hidden, would pop up magically once you started paying.

Just write them off and focus your efforts elsewhere; fighting with them gets you no where.

First, if they have the exact match on the keyword (which is sounds like they might) and they have a good site and seo, it may be vary hard to take the fist spots. You can always get a couple of your own on the first page. (I have one keyword with 5 places on the first page for an exact match).

Lets Focus:

How many reviews does the Yelp have?

Here is a Strategy for Yelp

You can use open site explorer to see where they have links to their Yelp Account.  Get those links to your Yelp account. How is their Yelp description written? What keywords do they use. Use a similarly keyword targeted description, keywords etc. Social bookmark your Yelp page with the keyword in the description and title.

Here is a strategy for Facebook:

How many likes does Facebook have? If they have way more fans than you and they post a lot it could be tough. If you have more fans than them make sure you have your keyword in the description of your page. Post more posts using your keyword if you can and not make it sound weird. Social bookmark a good piece of content written about your keyword that you post to Facebook.

Youtube:

Make a good youtube video, slide show type if you need, that is keyword targeted. Write a 300 word description with keywords, your site url possibly your Facebook url. Social bookmark it with your keywords in the title and description, this will increase views naturally and provide links. Wait a week after the social bookmarks have aged. Use Open Site Explorer to mine those links too.

They may be doing some sneaky stuff too like buying Facebook fans or Youtube views if their pages are junky and they rank. That stuff can be risky if done in high amounts.

Hope that gives you something to work with.

Thanks Nicholas. I appreciate the great insight!

Obviously you are new to seo and that is great.

You are also making the biggest seo mistake first, which is also good, because making mistakes helps you learn faster and you may as well start with the biggest mistake first.

Dave is right, after you have already unleashed the carnage of SE Nuke on your site scrap it and start over.

You need to get real traffic from real sites and real people, not just fictitious traffic from, auto created content that SE Nuke creates to trick Google into thinking you are a big site, which google will soon find out and never rank your site ever again. Damage already done.

Get your site going. Pay for some Google Adwords to get traffic to your site while you are learning the basics of SEO and learning how to get traffic from sources in your niche market. Create a blog and post quality content on it for starters.

Be prepared for the long ride which is SEO. It is a marathon that never ends, not a sprint to the finish line. Things constantly change and you will have to change with them or no matter how good you do today, you will be left behind tomorrow.

Good luck and wish you the best.

What have you done for link building? A spider web with only one thread catches few flies.

You need to start putting some content together about you business, how can you help your target customer? Then you need to start spreading it with links back to whatever page you are trying to rank for with occasional anchor text or long tail keywords.

Making sure you have company profiles on all the major outlets is a start: Twitter, Facebook, linked in, G+. Then make sure you post your newly created content there so it can get found. I noticed you haven't even filled out your Moz profile with a link back to your site...... all these little things add up to a lot.

Then get your business going on Moz local, this will create links and keyword rich descriptions that will be linked back to your business. Even if the links are no follow it helps Google know contextually what your site is about.

Make sure you have a blog. Make posts that can contribute to your target keyword (audience) and have them point to the target page.

Don't get discouraged it takes months and months depending on your keyword difficulty.

Good luck

I was wondering if anyone had a guide on how to transition your existing Google Places listing to the Google Plus local. I have a Google plus places listing for my business already and don't want to loose my reviews on my Google Local listing.

Thanks for the helpful tips Donna. We recently moved over to Wordpress from another platform with a subdomain on http, so we have quite a bit of content to transfer over to the new blog and redirect it from the old. Available time and resources are definitely a huge challenge right now.

I'm just trying to make sure I am going forward doing the best I can of categorizing the information (specific tags) and making them visibly available because our staff uses it regularly to direct clients to show what they will get for certain locations and shoot types etc.

Wordpress is our blogging back end and our front-end site isn't as easy to work with from a categorization standpoint, but works extremely well from a design standpoint so I am trying to make the most of what I have to work with.

I guess I am really looking at some good design ideas of how to organize the tags from a visibility and usability standpoint.

I'm definitely in the house cleaning stage of the whole process.

Just go for the long tails with the main keyword in them. This way you hit both in one swoop, because as you build the long tails it will build up your links and content stemming from the main keyword.

I have been doing this with one of my sites and the more long tailed content I create and the farther I move up the results for the long tails I have also seen a slow but very steady increase in rankings for my main keywords.

How long has the drop in traffic been happening for?

I have switched names of a few branded domains to shorter URLs like it looks like you are doing and I saw a significant drop in traffic for a while, around 3 months. I was sweating it hard, but it did eventually pop back up.

Just try to build some new quality links to the new URL using your brand name as the anchor text and also the naked URL as the anchor text so Google can see that it is emerging as the new preferred domain. A blog post also helps to announce the domain change and once created spread it far and wide on social media.

I am looking for clarification as well. It seemed to me that you needed to go and claim you google local listing via google plus to properly transition your reviews and information correctly.

I have been doing weddings and photography for years and understand just where you are at. I started out in photography then expanded to wedding planning. From being successful with Google keeping the #1 spots for my desired keywords even today, this is what I do.

I have a different website for each thing that I offer. Photography=website + blog. Wedding planning= website+blog. Weddings and photography go hand and hand, yes, but you won't be able to compete on both fronts for keywords unless you separate them out, as google just won't let you take down that many keywords with just one site like they used to. You aren't going to rank for weddings and event planning on the same site unless it is a long-tailed keyword like "wedding event planning". Also, you don't want to dilute your event planning site with weddings, because then you are just going to rank "ok" for each and not great for either.

It is much more work to keep the sites separate, but you don't want to confuse clients or turn them away by having them think you don't offer a service they need (because of your name) when you actually do offer that service as well.   If you are confusing google, take it as a sign that you are confusing clients too, because you are. I would get another phone # for the other business and use unit #A  & Unit B to denote a difference in address.

I also understand the subdomain idea, but it then causes the blog overlap which you don't want.

We just keep our sites separate. Then in blog posts credit the other site or blog as if it was a separate company that was the contractor you used for the event.

We have had excellent luck with this as it happened out of necessity and it seems nearly identical to your current scenario.

Good luck.

I will check the things you guys told me and see what I can find. The Urls were found in Google search console.

Dmoz is great if you can ever get them to take your listing. I have 5 different sites I have submitted to Dmoz one of them 4 times and have not got one of them listed yet over many years. I have even read their specific directions for submitting very carefully with no luck. Also, all of my pages are on the first page for my respective keywords, most at #1 so my sites are of authority, Dmoz editors are just lazy. Submit once then don't worry about it unless you know an editor who can get you listed.

Also, if anyone else knows a full proof way to get listed by Dmoz, I would love to hear your helpful insight.

Thanks Logan. That is exactly what I wanted. James is right it is for Local SEO. Bummer it doesn't have small business listing.

After doing tons of local search and tons of seo for a few sites, this is what I have found.

• Local search really helps with distribution of your targeted keyword and linking it to your business name. Therefore it helps with brand building and associating your brand to a particular keyword.

• Local search can have no bearing on your site ranking for organic keywords. My findings: I have two sites #1 for very specific keywords (white hat only) and one has about 100 local citations and the other has 5. Keywords are both equally competitive.

Citations are great for brand building and help reinforce your keyword greatly, but the waters are quickly getting muddied as large local citation companies are starting one main local citation site and creating hundreds of mini sites they also own.  This practice if forcing you to pay for their service to update local search information on tons of their mini sites or you have to waste tons of your time to fix them and most you can't fix anyway without their service or they will just take half a year to update the info or you have to submit a support ticket, which they don't answer. Their is no way to keep up with this process as more sites are being added by these companies weekly.

I found all of this out because I had one of my companies have an address change, which was #1 for local search for a specific keyword and had hundreds of local citations. Now after the address change it is on page 4. Since the large citation companies are constantly pulling data, they will pull data from one you haven't updated just yet and you start all over again as they redistribute the info to 30 more sites. I have also run into situations where it is updated in their system, but the page with the old info is archived and can't be removed without repeated contact and they never contact you back. It comes down to is the ROI worth the countless hours spent on a nearly impossible task.

My Ultimate Advice:

• Pick the top 10 citation sources most relevant to your business and make those amazing by linking to them with additional great resources. Citation companies are going to auto create more for you anyway and if you have any changes in address, url, photos etc. the clean up may be possible? Or it may still take you 100 hours to complete and still not be correct. It is a crap shoot!!