Internet Building Codes Blog

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

The other day we started talking a little about text to code ratios.  That’s the correct way to state it.  However, many people, and a large number of sites refer to it as a text to code ratio.  I’ve even fallen victim to the incorrect nature of the phrase and have been known to talk about code to text ratios because the phrase is used so often.  If you think about the ratio itself though, it’s really not a code to text ratio.   It’s a text to code ratio.  Symantics aside, let’s talk about a few ways to increase your text to code ratio (or code to text ratio if you prefer.)

First of all, the goal is to have lots of content compared to the amount of code required to create it.  Look at it this way.   Try to have more content than code.  That will automatically yield a high text to code ratio.

So how do you do that?  Here are a couple ways.

Write tons of content.  Simple as that.  Make pages with more than a thousand words and your text to code ratio will likely be pretty high.  However, poorly programmed pages just generate more code to format more content and it’s a never ending cycle of adding more code and more content so the ratio never climbs.

To increase the text to code ratio, use CSS to write you pages.  CSS is so clean that the pages naturally create high text to code ratios.  But I’m not just talking about using CSS to define your font styles.  You have to use it to lay out the whole page.

Limit your use of large scripts.  If you use things like javascript drop down menus, you’re likely adding hundreds of lines of extra code into your pages.  It’s still okay to use javascripts, but you have to externalize the scripts themselves.  Just save the javascript into a file all by itself and reference the script in your page.  That way, the hundreds of lines of code are not calculated into the text to code ratio and your page appears to be cleaner.

Create highly optimized pages that limit the number of links, images, scripts etc.  Sure, you can use all of those things in the main pages of your site, but consider creating a select few pages that are optimized by eliminating extra things that only bloat your code.

Never use tables.  With the advent of CSS, we were finally able to eliminate the dreaded table from our design.  Now you can define position and color and size without the use of a table.  Every single cell in atable requires multiple definitions to describe the length, height, position, color, background color, padding, cell spacing etc.  These elements can really begin to bloat the code when you have a table with 6 cells and each one has a table nested within it.  Eliminate tables in favor of table-less CSS and Google will reward you.

Chadd Bryant
Internet Building Codes

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