Emergency Help...

[symbolphoto]

Hello All,

I'm trying to get a better handle on this, but any help would be hugely appreciated. Per my Pro account, i just found out that the keyword i was severely trying to rank for "Boston Wedding Phot*grapher"  i just declined by over 40 positions. Just last week i was in the #3 position.

Needless to say, this is extremely bad. I feel sick from it. This is my livelyhood. I recently hired a 'so-called' SEO expert to look at it, but i'm having my doubts. I'm using a php based site with a wordpress blog.

He added a bunch of 301 redirects from pages that the crawler was complaining about to my .htaccess file.

He also installed the following plugins:

Link Juice Keeper

NoFollow Free

The SEO Rich Snippets

Udinra All Image Sitemap

WP Robots Txt

WP-PageNavi

Add Meta Tags

These are essentially the only changes made. Does anyone see anything blaring and/or obvious? I could really really use some help.

My blog link is :  http://www.symbolphoto.com/blog/

I'm assuming it's the blog because that's where most of my site content is located.

Any advice is hugely appreciated. TIA.

[inhouseseo]

You don't have a lot of backlinks, and the ones you do have don't seem spammy- no overuse of keywords or spammy sites. I didn't go through the all the top sites, but the very first result (used to be ONLY 2 spots above you) is much better optimized. They have a much higher domain authority + plus they have more than 10 times as many links (again I didn't spend much time on the links, but the anchor text didn't seem spammy).

It seems that there were just some fluctuations in ranking factors, and your site doesn't deserve the ranking it once had in Google's opinion. You likely did not set off any sort of spam filter.

At this point, invest in some good content and try to make the site more useful.

BTW, when I searched for "boston wedding photographer" I didn't see any sponsored results. You might be able to drive some traffic without breaking the bank via PPC.

[Aran_Smithson]

I agree with everything inhouseseo says above. Sound advice.

I've recently been looking at the wedding niche with a view to finding guest post opportunities, one thing that came to light is there's a ton of blogs out there that love publishing series of photos from weddings.

I'm not sure where you stand with ownership of the photos and whether you have the right to publish without the consent of the 'models'. Theres a great opportunity to assemble 10-15 shots write some commentary and then create a series of posts using 6/7 different shots from the collection and differing comments and post them around various wedding.

Myblogguest.com is great place to start. I think this could be the cheapest/quickest way to get the links your looking for.

Best of luck and I sincerely hope you get your old positions back.

Regards

Aran

Ps.(oh and in the mean time you might wanna hit facebook/twitter/pinterest and post some photos, connect with your target audience, it could drive some valuable traffic in! and it just might help you rank)