SEO Tips and Tactics – Text to Code Ratio
Ever heard of a text to code ratio? This may be one of the few things that most SEO technicians are not aware of. A text to code ratio is simply a measurement of how much content you have on your page compared to the amount of code required to create that page. A low text to code ratio is bad. A high text to code ratio is good. If you Google “text to code ratio” you’ll find a number of sites that run a quick test on your page to determine the ratio. Run the test and see if you get a number like 3% or 63%. A result of 3% basically means that your page is 3% content and 97% code. That’s pretty pathetic. Google sees sites like that and gives up and goes away. They’re not interested in reading code. They’re only interested in finding the visible text that your readers can see. If you make Google crawl through obnoxious amounts of code, just to find the content in your site, they’ll give up and skip your pages. On the other hand, if you code your pages so that they are clean and use CSS, your text to code ratio will likely be above 30% or 40%. Great sites are above 60%. Strive for a high text to code ratio and Google will reward you.
Chadd Bryant
Internet Building Codes
