There are a huge number of factors that impact the search engine optimization rank of the website. These factors may include the quality of content, the number of keywords used, backlinks and so on. Another factor which does not have a direct impact on the SEO ranking of your website is the code to text ratio. It is not very frequently talked about but it does have a significance when it comes to SEO rank. So, let us understand what exactly is code to text ratio and how it impacts the SEO ranking of your website.

What is code to text ratio?

Code to text ratio refers to the amount of text versus the amount of HTML code on a particular webpage. It has an effect on the search ranking of your websites. For a very long duration of time, SEO experts have been assuming that search engines prefer high code to text ratio. However, this is not the case. Code to text ratio helps to determine whether the webpage is optimised or not and whether it is properly readable to the users. Only then your website will be identified by the search engine crawlers and it will get a good rank. Outbound Lead Generation can also improve the code to text ratio of your website.

Why is the code to text ratio important?

The code to text ratio will allow you to identify inefficient coding on your web page. It indicates the page loading speed which will directly impact your user experience as well as your ranking. A low text to code ratio on a page with good quality content indicates inefficient coding which will lead to bad SEO performance. Clean and light code helps the page to load faster. If a page loads slowly, it will definitely hit your ranking. So, a high text to code ratio is a sign that you need to bring about improvements to your website immediately.

Although code to text ratio will not have any direct impact on your search engine, it is something that must not be ignored. If your website has more HTML code than text then you must work on it immediately to make sure that your page is readable for the search engine crawler. Here we are mentioning a few steps using which you will be able to optimise the text to HTML ratio of your webpage and give your users a really good experience:

Commenting system: The first way that you should consider in order to keep more text on the pages is to enable a commenting system on your website. The commenting system should be open to the public and should not be kept private. You must not ask your users for registration to comment on your web page.

Forum: You may also try to create a forum on your website where your users will be able to share their ideas with one another. The discussions on the forums should have relevant threads where you can add additional text.

Code minifying: There are a lot of tools available for free on the Internet which will allow you to minimise your code without causing any effect on the function of the website. This technique is really important in maintaining proper code to text ratio. However, it will make the code unreadable to human beings.

Few other ways to improve code to text ratio:

Remove excessive white space
Avoid using loads of tabs
Remove comments from the code section
Avoid using tables and use images of tables instead of using tables
Optimise the images and remove excessive images
Use JavaScript and flash only
Always keep some plain text on your web page.

Conclusion:

It is always important to maintain a good SEO rank. So, you need to know all the important SEO tools and techniques so that your webpage appears in the foremost search result pages.