Text to Code Ratio
Text to code ratios are becoming more and more important in the all-important SEO race to the top of Google’s organic listings. Simply put, a text to code ratio is a measurement that shows how much of your page is code is compared to the amount of visible text you have on your pages. A page with lots of code and just a little content will have a low text to code ratio, a number like 3%. A page with clean, well-written code and lots of great content will have a higher ratio, like 40%. Google has shown preference for sites with higher text to code ratios simply because they have lots of great content. But notice that just having lots of content won’t give you a great text to code ratio. You also have to have clean code. If you’re a programmer that writes bloated code, like Dreamweaver does, then you’re likely to offset any gain you see by increasing your content because while adding more content, you also add more code to display it. So you have to use clean code AND longer content to increase your text to code ration.
How do you do that? The best way is to avoid the use of tables for your layouts. CSS can position your images and format your content with limited code so relative to programming with tables, your code will be cleaner. Google can look at your code and easily find the content. They’re in the business of finding your content, not your code so if they have to week through thousands of lines of code just to get to a couple lines of content, they’re likely to leave and stop reading through all of the pages in your site. But if you have a page of code that’s only 50 lines long with 25 lines of content, Google will reward you.
Hope that helps.
Chadd Bryant
