THATBlog

The importance of Code to Text ratio is often lost in SEO. Business owners are often not savvy enough to know to ask for a site with a good code to text ratio, or in some circumstances even the SEOs they hire do not understand the concept.

Basically the more code you have on a page, the less search engine spiders will be able to pick up on the important language in your text for rankings purposes. Your message gets lost in the code....

There are several things that can keep a code to text ratio too low:

1) Minimal Text on a Page
2) Placement of large amounts of Javascript on the page
3) Placement of CSS on the page
4) Table on Table development

All of these besides number 1 can be combated. If you only have one sentence of text on a page, obviously you are going to have a low Code to Text Ratio, but if not, you should be running around 50% code to 50% text or better.

Here are some ways to create a better code to text ratio:

1) Store Javascript in external file son your server and simply call for it in your code. There is not real need to place most Javascript directly on the page, save space and file it externally.
2) Create smooth tableless CSS pages. These are great pages from an optimization standpoint. First they create a better code to text ratio, and second they give the spiders a clear path through the entire page for indexing. Tables should only be used for tabular data.
3) Place all CSS in external CSS files. This makes is easier as you develop anyway, so you can simply call the entire CSS instead of rewriting it.