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you got it.

I agree that the critical indicates the importance of the factor and that the green check mark indicates the line item's completion.

Hi Jason, The explanation of your business model is helpful in a number of ways. Interestingly, (and excitingly), Google+ Local actually has a category for magicians. Go to Mike Blumenthal's category tool (http://blumenthals.com/Google_LBC_Categories) and type 'magician' into the search box. Here's what you'll see: Category: Magician Synonyms: magic, _magician_s, parties, party, magic, _magician_s, parties, party, magic, _magician_s, parties, party As a Local SEO, I find this extremely interesting because it immediately clues us in to how Google categorizes and views your business, indicating that these are core terms that should be included in the development of your local business profiles and website optimization. I am not sure from your description whether you are making specific efforts to promote your business via Local SEO. I would think you should be doing so, provided your business meets the following criteria: Has a name or DBA Has a dedicated street address (even if it's a home address that you hide when creating your local business listings) Has a local area code phone number Makes face-to-face contact with customers (like when you perform your magic act) If you can say 'yes' to all four things, then you should be doing Local Search Marketing to promote your business to its fullest. Unfortunately, whether you are researching terms like 'magician' or 'entertainer', keyword research tools can give, at best, a general picture of actual local traffic. Things like the Google Keyword Planner Tool and Google Insights can help to form this general picture, but you sort of have to make an assumption that people in major cities are, indeed, looking for magicians and entertainers. As a local business, the core of your geographic optimization is going to be based on the city in which you are physically located. If your street address is in Cleveland, then this is what Google sees you as the most relevant answer for, when it comes to user queries. You can work to appear high in the LOCAL results (often called the 7-pack) for people searching for variations of the term 'magician cleveland' or for searches searching for 'magician' from a device located in Cleveland. Again, we are talking about LOCAL results here. Now, many business models may be located in one city, but also travel to serve additional cities (think of plumbers). Because of Google's bias towards physical location in the city of search, these service area businesses are unlikely to appear in the Local results for these additional service cities. Instead, they have go after gaining visibility in the ORGANIC results for these additional service cities. Currently, best practices for achieving this involve the creation of city landing pages. One page for each city where you serve. The content on each page must be unique and awesome. It should be optimized for what you do in the city where you do it. You can read a detailed explanation of this practice here: The Nitty Gritty of City Landing Pages For Local Businesses How well this practice works depends on how competitive your local market is, and how much work you may need to do to promote these pages. Gaining even a modest amount of visibility in the organic results for your additional service cities can make phones ring, so this will be an important area for you to investigate. Hope this helps!

Hi Jason Glad you are liking the community so far! I would recommend starting with this post I did for Moz to help answer exactly these questions about WordPress and SEO: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success When you're starting out and have just a few tags (6 isn't much) it's not a huge deal, but for some sites as they grow it turns into 300+ tags without planning on it - then it's a little more of an issue. Not something that would cause a penalty per se, but just not great for the site to have those extra pages indexed and existing because they don't generally add any value (they are often similar to the posts themselves). I would use maybe 3-4 tags tops for any blog post. They are little detailed words to describe the content. Additionally, tags only have a utility if used as navigation in the site somehow: either a list of popular tags in the sidebar or sometimes you can click on the tags for each post at the bottom of the post. Lots of people try to make tags to rank in search engines but I have found this to be a bad strategy. In general, I recommend people to noindex tags as shown in the article. With the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress you should also "noindex subpages of archives". Categories - I would create 5-7 categories that you will file all blog posts into - and only use those and don't let categories grow (don't keep adding new categories). You can customize your category pages with this plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-custom-category-pages/ - and indexing them is fine. Good luck! -Dan