Meredith's Husband: 0:33

Hey, this is Meredith's husband. I've got some SEO advice for you, but I'm going to keep it really simple, so that you can understand it, so it makes sense, and most importantly, so you can actually use it. I think it's kind of cool. It probably drives people crazy, but, oh, I don't know, it makes it so I don't I know you haven't. Well, I wanted to talk today about something that hopefully will save a little bit of time. Oh, gosh, some great some SEO myths and just some things you can ignore, a few things you don't have to worry about, even if you're using something like SEMrush. Yes, you might see these things I get, I get this, a couple of these questions I get all the time from people using SEMrush or other tools. They are reported as issues, warnings, things that you have to fix and you don't, you don't need to worry about them.

Meredith: 1:31

Okay, good to know. Buster is nesting. Sorry. Busters, let's see if he's done. Okay, what do you have? So

Meredith's Husband: 1:39

I have five of them. Oh, and there's the first couple I get all the time, like almost every week, I get these questions. And so the first one people get this issue if they're using especially Squarespace. If you're using Squarespace to get this, there's a good chance you get it using WordPress. I got it from question. This question from people using Duda mobile, which is another, yeah, it's an old 1d, U, D, A, it was like, kind of like Squarespace. It was like Squarespace, but 10 years before Squarespace existed, so and that is, and you'll and again, if you're using SEMrush, you'll get this exact error. It says low text to HTML ratio. And, yeah, yeah, question mark. Everybody's like, what is this? How do I fix it? The good news is, it's not important. You don't need to fix it. You can just flat out ignore it. I will say, though, if you are if you get that error, you want to also look to see if you see an error called Low word count, and that that one you'd want to look at a little more closely. That's just saying you don't have enough words on the page. But the low text to HTML ratio, Google has said very publicly and now repeatedly, you do not need it doesn't make a difference. You don't need to do anything with that. So I kind of, I kind of don't know why SEO Tools still report it SEMrush,

Meredith: 2:58

especially say or why it's even out there, if it's not important. But

Meredith's Husband: 3:02

if you have that digital dirt, if you're using SEMrush, you can just hide that entire issue, and that should help bring this there's a couple different ways you can hide an issue in SEMrush, next to the name of the issue. There's a little eyeball icon. Yeah, you click that, it's going to hide that issue from the next time your site is scanned, so it'll just disappear. That's great. Don't have to worry about it. Yeah? Wonderful. I

Meredith: 3:25

wish we had that for everything. Yeah, I know.

Meredith's Husband: 3:28

Really hide. Just click Hide, ignore that one, delete. So the second one I get a lot is long title tags. Okay? And this is another thing that it doesn't affect SEO. You can have title tags that are 800 paragraphs long, if you want, right? It's not gonna cause a problem. Short, yeah, well, I did, but people misunderstand that. It's like a big problem if your title tags are too long, all it means is that they're going to get truncated, they're going to be cut off, and nobody's going to see it, and it's going to if you have and you should have your keywords in your title tag, the longer your title tag is, the more diluted it it becomes. So for example, if you have a title tag and your your keyword, say, is made up of three terms and your title tag is six terms, half of your title tag is going to be allocated towards those keywords, which is good. If you have those same three terms and your title tag is 170 words terms, then all of a sudden it's not as focused. That's that's the issue. And the other issue is being truncated. Personally, I think it just looks better in Google when your site appears and it's not cut off with a.dot.at the end. It just looks better. It's pretty so, yeah, but it's not it's not a problem. It's not harming your SEO. Okay, if you have title tags that are too long, thank you for clarifying. And that's kind of closely related to description tags. Description tags also couple things. You don't need to put your keywords in there. It doesn't matter at all. It makes no difference. Everyone you do, not you do. There's also a character, what we call a character limit on description tags, again, there's no harm if you go over that limit, it's just not going to be displayed like no one is ever going to see your description tag beyond about 160 characters. So, so don't you know if it's too long, don't think it's the end of the world, but just realize nobody's reading that. Okay, the one thing that you need to be. Aware of whether your description tags is that all of your pages need one, and they need to be unique. So you can't use the same one for a whole bunch of different pages. And if you have pages that don't have a description tag, you want to create one. That's the that's the only way that description tags can affect SEO. If you duplicate them or you don't have them, okay, say that one more time. The only way that description tags can affect your SEO, yeah, is if you have pages that don't have a description tag, it's missing, or you or you duplicate your description tag on several different pages.

Meredith: 6:06

Okay, I just for those in the back. I needed to hear it again. Thank you.

Meredith's Husband: 6:11

Another issue that I see very often, especially on Squarespace sites, fairly often on WordPress sites as well, is anything with JavaScript and CSS files, there's a few different issues. And I know this sounds what is even I'm sorry it doesn't it doesn't even matter. Okay, what those things are, so don't think about them. But the issues that you will see are that your JavaScript and CSS files are uncompressed, unminified, and something else. If you are running a site on Squarespace, you can't do anything about this anyway. There's nothing you can do. And to be honest, I think that Squarespace just uses a method that is probably okay, but not recognized by tools like SEMrush, it's probably fine. So if you're on Squarespace and you see anything with JavaScript CSS, and it might say js or CSS files, you can just ignore those, hide those from your SEMrush or whatever tool you're using. And also, if you're on WordPress and see those issues, I would put them on the lowest priority. You know, don't worry about them too much. Don't freak out, because it's kind of technical. You can get into bigger problems trying to fix it. I would say, just don't worry about they're better fish to fry. They're focused elsewhere. And then the final one, number five, anything, if you're using SEMrush, anything under the notices category notices, pretty much you don't have to worry about those, as the name would indicate. I guess, they're just notices. No, no, they're not errors or warnings. They're just things you should be aware of. In that category of things, there's, there's two exceptions. Okay, two things that I think you probably should look into if you see them.

Meredith: 7:59

Okay, so kind of skim through it, look for these things.

Meredith's Husband: 8:02

Yeah, you'll see it if you click on notices, they'll just be a bullet list of issues. Okay, what do we look for? Permanent redirects? Oh, you'd want to look at and orphaned pages insight, maps, oh, yeah, I know it sounds sad. Those are the only two you would want to look at. For the most part. Everything else that notices you can just ignore, you don't need to worry about.

Meredith: 8:26

And then what do you what about those, those two that the orphans? What about the

Meredith's Husband: 8:31

orphans? Check out my blog on how to fix those. Okay, do a search for those two specific issues, and I will explain on individual blogs, because it's very resourceful. Okay, so there's what that means and how to fix it. Orphans, orphaned pages and sitemaps and other permanent redirects. Both of those, not the end of the world, but not great. You probably want to fix them, if you can do it, something

Meredith: 9:00

to pay attention to. Yes, that's it. That's it. Yeah, oh boy. That was chock full of facts. Well,

Meredith's Husband: 9:09

I hope it saves some anxiety, because I get, like, I get these questions from people who are freaking out. Don't know how to fix it, but trying to fix them. And just say, the good news is you don't have to worry about it. Check out the blog. The blog is really good. I don't didn't think that was that funny.

Meredith: 9:33

You never know. We could be walking past listeners, not even know it if we

Meredith's Husband: 9:37

were walking down the street having a conversation and somebody walked past like, wait, I know those voices.

Meredith: 9:45

Hey, thank you so much for listening. We really hope that you find this helpful and useful, and if you do what you could do for us as a thanks would be to drum roll, please, yes. Leave a review. Yes, everybody says it, I know, but it really does make a difference. Take three seconds, leave as many stars. Say something really nice about what you like, about the podcast, and maybe why other people would like it. It would mean the world to us, especially my husband, that better, all right, I'm gonna try one where I'm not gonna be charming. I'm.