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HTML Code to Text Ratio – SEO

Posted: December 19th, 2005 | Filed under: Internet Marketing | 7 Comments »

Text to HTML Ratio for SEOHere is something I never really considered much before, and that is a pages HTML Code to Text ratio. Meaning, how much of your web page is html markup and how much is actual text that the Search Engines will read. This is important because Search Engines will only read and index the actual text of a page and they will only go so far into a page to read either HTML or Text. If your page is mainly HTML code then there’s a good chance the Search Engines won’t read all of your text.

So what is the perfect ratio? Well, the more the better. This site sits currently at about 31% which is not bad at all when compared to most sites. The reason this site has a high ratio is because most of it uses CSS. It also adheres to W3C Standards which means that the code is clean and can be easily spidered by the Search Engines. Sometimes if a Search Engine spider encounters invalid HTML markup it will leave the page.

I found a great tool you can use to get your ratio here. How much your ratio weighs in your overall rankings may never be known. But it is another factor to consider when building and optimizing websites for the Search Engines.

Here are a few other sites with related info. on this topic…

7 Comments on “HTML Code to Text Ratio – SEO”

  1. 1 PHPMonkey said at 8:43 pm on September 7th, 2006:

    HTML Code to text ratio is pretty important, it’s sad how many people litter their markup w/ so much formatting and style info, or more often then not just a ton of useless tags, oh well makes it that much easier for me to get better rankings i guess :)

  2. 2 seo blog said at 6:01 am on November 19th, 2007:

    Yes,I think you are right.But coundn’t you tell me the formula of code to text ratio ?

  3. 3 gazette news online said at 9:08 pm on November 20th, 2007:

    Nice post man. was just looking for perfect ratio.

  4. 4 Gav said at 3:48 pm on January 8th, 2008:

    So what about Alt tags – are they classified as keywords or code?

  5. 5 Miles Baker said at 9:04 pm on January 8th, 2008:

    That’s a good question Gav, my assumption would be that it would be classified as code, but I can’t really say for sure, I don’t like to go off assumptions.

  6. 6 Greg said at 8:30 pm on January 23rd, 2008:

    So what is a good ratio? What number are we looking for? I have a site at 25% and one at 35%. Are those good?

  7. 7 IT-Audit said at 1:54 pm on March 20th, 2008:

    Thanks for this piece of information. I’m looking still working on the perfect ratio. Google likes lots of content. :)