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There are many routes.  I am not saying which one is best or which one will work.  Some might work, some might be a disaster.  I suggest hiring an SEO who has experience in recovering site moves that have gone bad.

Two routes that come to my mid are...

A) Go back to Homestead and have them restore an exact copy of your site from back up.  This would have been a good choice if done immediately after your move.  Now  a couple months have gone by and this might be a bad move.   You need advice from someone who has experience in this problem.

B) If you have a list of the Homestead URLs. You might be able to find someone who knows how to do 301 redirects on BigCommerce.    I saw lots of old URLs of your site at Archive.org and they were hitting 404 pages on your new domain, some were doing 302 redirects, some were producing an empty page.  This might recover some of your loss.  How much, I can't say.  You need an experienced person.

So there you have Door A and Door B.  Each has its problems.   There could be Door C and Door D that an experience person would know about.

If this was my site I would be hiring experience as soon as possible.

Match the title to valuable queries.  (toss all dead weight overboard)

Match the description to the strongest selling points (what people want to do/see/buy/etc there in this case).  Keep in mind that query words in the description will be bolded.

This sounds a little risky.

I would avoid doing redirects if possible.

If this was my site, I would get into my analytics and find out which 100 pages are pulling in most of the sales from people who enter from search.   I would then spend whatever time it takes to recode about five pages by hand,  using the best SEO practices within my ability.

I want to make them into something kickass.

After I did the first five of those pages, I would get in touch with a consultant, show her those pages (before and after shots), tell her the goal and have her give opinion on what might be done better.  When I do something big like this I always get second opinion from someone who does more SEO than me and who is smarter about it than I am.   I might ask a question on Moz or get a friend to look at something.   I always get advice from people I trust when doing this.  I don't worry about cost.   One taken opportunity can be worth literally a million dollars in the long term.  One screw up can cost many thousands of dollars immediately and millions over time.

So, after these consults I would launch a few dozen hand-crafted pages and see what happens.  A couple weeks later I would launch  more if the results were good.

The higher the value of these pages the more that I would do by hand.  Once I thought that I had things under control then I would write or have written a program to do the rest of the job automatically.

I am never in a hurry on a high value job like this.

Matt Cutts video on this topic from November, 2013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHG6BkmzDEM

I believe that Adsense can negatively influence your rankings. That can happen if the adsense causes the visitor to scroll before seeing your content or causes the visitor to have a hard time recognizing your content. What you describe is very very conservative. Should not cause any problem.

I feel the same way about the ads.  They are like a bad dog that rushes at you when you approach the property line and chases you down the street.  Worse even than Forbes - and they are really bad IMO.

I agree with you.

It was a chest thumper article.  It simply crows about rigging a fix for historic bad practice.  It does not explain what caused the problem and the randon links solution isn't the best way to handle 404 traffic and probably not the best way to repair site structure problems.

I think that your "hub" pages can be category pages and more.

Imagine a hub page for widgets with.... "how to do it" articles down the left column, "widget reviews" down the center column, and tips on "how to enjoy widgets" down the right column.

These could look like your sample page or look like the homepage of Slate.com... or any other news site's homepage or category pages if you have enough content.

I have hundreds of articles on my site and they range in length between 500 and 4000 words - with lots of photos.

My retail pages usually have several hundred words of unique relevant content and they often link to article content (500 to 4000 words) that explains how to use the product, how to select, how to repair, etc.  These are clusters of content around retail products.  In my opinion, it is the best way to rank.... but sometimes your articles will rank better than your retail  --  but, that's OK because we have house ads on those pages to let visitors know that we sell the stuff.

Compared to most others, my articles are usually long, ranging from 1000 to 4000 words.

I don't think that I would publish a single article that is 15,000 words unless there was no way to break it down, such as a long story.  However, if it is informative content, I would probably break it into at least three or four shorter articles that are stand-alone about a single topic.

The New York Times has a lot of really long articles (10,000 words plus).  I honestly don't like them because they take too long to read.  If they can't break them into multiple short articles then I think that they should simply shorten them.

I am currently reviewing my strategy when it comes to categories and tags on my site.

Everyone should do this.  I do it once every year or so.

Having been no-indexed for some time, and having many tags with just one entry I am thinking that this is not optimal for SEO purposes.

I agree.  I don't use tag pages.

Categories - Change these to Index, but only after adding a hundred words or so by way of introduction (see this example).

Where I have used categories, I wait until I have a substantive amount of material to appear on the category page.  I visited your sample page and can't tell if the hundred words or so at the top is yada yada yada content or real beef.  If it is real beef then go with it.  If it is yada yada yada then wait until you have a large enough number of posts that your page is of substantive length.

Also, I run periodic traffic assessments on my category pages.  If some of them are not bringing in the traffic or at least showing traffic growth then I delete them (301 redirect to the blog homepage).  My philosophy is that a compact site competes better for difficult, high-traffic terms if it does not have a lot of useless pages.

I am thinking of deleting all tags with just one entry,

Yes, these never should have been created.

and trying to merge those with just two or 3 entries where it makes sense

If this is going to create pages that compete with category pages then just delete them.

I will keep these as no-index, but I think this will mean more optimal distribution of link juice within the site.

In my opinion, tag pages are dangerous if they have snippets of the same content that appears on category pages and on the main blog page and its paginations.  Also, tag pages that are same topic as category pages are a bad idea in my opinion.

If you are not indexing pages they will pull zero traffic from search.  If you have links to them then you linkjuice is being scattered into potentially low-value pages.  I am all about internal linking but keep my philosophy that compact sites compete more strongly for the difficult queries where the big traffic is earned.

I would optimize my homepage for the terms that the average potential client uses for my services.  When you receive a call or an email from a potential client, what service do they ask for?

If they ask for Wedding Magician, or Party Magician, then that should be your target terms for the homepage.

If they ask for Table Magician or Close up Magician then those should be the keywords that you optimize for.

Are they simply asking for a magic show instead?

When composing a title tag, it is best to keep the length below 60 characters, better yet 55.  It is also best to place high value keywords on the left and make the title tag contain a readable thought rather than a stuff of keywords.

Roger Lapin: Wedding Magician - Close up Magician - Table Magician ??

That is far too long and stuffed with keywords.

Magic Shows for Weddings and Parties - Roger Lapin

This is a readable thought.  60 characters.  Hits magic, shows, weddings, parties

Magician for Weddings and Parties - Roger Lapin

This is a readable thought.  57 characters.  Hits magician, weddings, parties

Should your name be first or last?  Depends upon your level of fame, how much you want to be optimized for keywords and your sense of ego.

At any given time Google has lots of different indexes.   They are always testing different algos and using different vintages of data.  All of this happens on thousands of severs at multiple data centers worldwide.   So, if your pages are relatively new then they might be in and out of the the search results that you see depending upon which of the many servers responds to your query.  The newer the pages, the more volatile they might be.  The weaker your website, the longer it will take them to stabilize in the search results.

That is a partial answer to your question.   (Read the book "In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives" by Steven Levy.  Very interesting, helps you be a better SEO because you will understand how they think and work a little better.)

I made a lot of car accident lawyer city pages.  They probably weren't as unique as they should have been.

If you did this Google will probably index them and start displaying all of them.  Then, if Google decides that some of these pages are not as unique as they would like, some of them will be filtered from the search results.  To find out of this is happening go to the very end of the search results and on the last page you might see something like.....

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 10 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

If your page can be found in the "repeat the search.... " then you will know that Google thinks that the page is too similar to other pages on the web (on your site or on other sites) and they have filtered your page from the search results.

If you have lots of these pages then google might think that you have a low quality website and their Panda algo will get you.  That will demote the rankings of almost all of your pages for almost all of their relevant queries and your traffic will drop suddenly.

If you really make them mad with this stuff they might consider your site to be even lower  than low quality - meaning spam - and deindex lots of your pages or your entire site.

So, that is the stuff that can happen.  Don't publish a lot of cookie cutter pages or just change place names and insert synonyms.  Google has been slapping people for that stuff for at least ten years.

Also see here and here for good responses to similar questions asked by you and answered by Patrick Delehanty.

It is best to have a domain that anybody who ever has business with you can type in your domain without thinking or guessing... at the same time you don't want to force them to type the Gettysburg Address.

RJRNabisco.com did what you are talking about, but that is an extremely well known company and the company name was created by a merger and they didn't want to divorce Nabisco and they probably didn't want the word "tobacco" stinking up their name.

Twenty-three letters is pretty long and would look like this one...  thisdomainistoodamnlong.com.

So, if it was my company, I would go with something like toolong.com damnlong.com if those were word combinations that people use to refer to my company currently.  Whatever, you want a domain that everybody will know instantly then register any variants that people might type in by mistake and redirect them to the homepage of your actual website.

I use to work at an organization where the IT staff thought that domains should be as short as possible, so they registered the name without any vowels because the exact name was owned by a plumber         Telling someone the domain on the telephone was a nightmare.  It was not unusual for the person listening to say huh?  what?  repeat that? because the domain was absolutely unexpected and meaningless like thsdmnstdmnlng.com

I would call the page that you linked to "keyword stuffed".

I would call the page with the definition and the example sentence to be thin.

Most of the dictionary sites that are able to persist in the SERPs have more content per page.

The test will be to see if google will index these pages, if they will rank high enough for anything to pull traffic, and if Google sees them as a Panda problem.  I think these definition pages are risky.  Go out and look at what the dictionary sites (that rank for anything) have done on their definition pages.  There is a lot more content.

================================

On this page, Google sees a one sentence definition and one sentence that uses the word.  There is also a lot of characters that Google will not understand.

http://www.freescrabbledictionary.com/dictionary/word/haboob/

I copied some of the definitions and searched for them in text on Google.  The definitions that I checked were found verbatim on over 1000 websites.

The example sentences that use these pages are also not unique.  They are found on other websites.

These pages are risky for another reason.

Now, this is wrong for a host of reasons,

This is right for two reason (it serves the customer by making financing more obvious and it may serve the dealer if he profits from financing).

This might be right if the dealer profits from financing and search engines give extra weight to pages that have multiple links in the persistent navigation (they surely must be more important pages if linked to twice in the template - though many SEOs will disagree with me).

I see nothing wrong with it.

My main site has multiple links to multiple pages in the template.

What am I missing?

Moz numbers do not determine Google rankings.

Google likes the other site better for this query.  Neither of your sites are appropriate destinations for a person who searches for "churches in tyler tx".    Neither of your sites should be ranking for this query.

Google might not care for your site because your title tag begins with "Churches Tyler Texas".  That title is appropriate for a church directory but not for your website.  Google knows that your site is not a directory of churches in that community.    If you search for "Baptist Church in Tyler Texas" (which I think is the perfect query for you to attract visitors) and look at how your title tag is shown, you should see that Google has changed your title tag.  They don't enjoy it for this query.

If I ran this site I would change the title tag to Sylvania Baptist Church - Tyler Texas (or something similar, being very direct about what the site is about and not trying to use the title tag to present your  site as a directory of churches.

To accomplish to goal of being visible when someone searches for a Baptist Church(es) in Tyler Texas, I would focus my efforts on local search, rather than organic search.  A good place to start learning about local search is here... https://moz.com/learn/local

Being optimized for local search will qualify your site to be listed on the map of churches that appears for the query "baptist churches in tyler texas"  OR  "churches in tyler texas".   These queries are where the action is at for your target searcher.

I see that you are on the map and in the local pack for "churches in tyler texas".   Getting better optimized for local search might help you do better for this more important query.

Small on-page changes have the greatest opportunity to be helpful when you compete for a keyword with very little competition.  However, as the level of competition increases other factors become so much more important that tweaking text adornments becomes meaningless.  This is logical because in very competitive SERPs, searchers are more concerned with content quality, reputation of the company, and other factors of visitor satisfaction, than what's in italics on the page.

I don't go through my pages bolding my keywords because I think that it looks distracting to the visitor.  However, I do bold in-content link text to call attention to it.  Doing that lets the visitor know that I have more information about those topics on other pages of my website.  It does lift visitor engagement with those links.  That increases my ad revenue and may lift my rankings because of the deeper visitor engagement.

One of my employees thinks that it looks "cartoony" and I kind of agree, but I still like the look because I am proud of the content that the visitor will find after clicking the links.

What am I doing wrong?

It sounds like you have tuned up your website and have improved its condition.  That is the minimum entry fee for good website performance.

Now that you have done the basics, the best way to improve your organic performance is to get new high quality content on the site that is better than your competitors have published for the same topic.   If you have the ability to produce content that is shared spontaneously by your visitors then you can spend all of your time producing more content.  If you don't have that ability then you will have to promote it or hire someone to kick it up a notch.