Understanding Code to Text Ratio

Many search engines such as Google base their search results upon relevancy to the content provided. So basically if the page isn’t relevant, it won’t appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs). So let’s say that the content on your web page is there and relevant to what a user would search for. What possible factor could not make my page rank well?

If your web page contains too much HTML code, that could prevent a search engine spider from crawling the page in its entirety. Some search engine crawlers will check the amount of code there is on a page and compare it to the amount of text as part of its algorithm. If the page is too big, the spider may only be allowed to capture portions of the page, leaving out possible vital and relevant content.

There are tools across the internet that can tell you what your code to text ratio is. A rule of thumb would be the higher the number, the better.

Ways to lower the amount of code on a web page:

• Use CSS layouts instead of table-based layouts.
• Put CSS and Javascript into external files.
• Take out tags that have no purpose.
• Use valid code.