Here are what you are going to learn in this piece:
- What is text to HTML ratio?
- How to calculate text to HTML ratio
- How this ratio impacts your website performance
- Other important things to know
Many website owners and users have never heard of “text to HTML ratio”, and so have never bothered about it. Knowledge of what text to HTML ratio is can go a long way in influencing how your websites or web pages perform with search engines. What then is text to HTML ratio?
What Is Text to HTML Ratio?
A text to HTML ratio is a measurement of the amount of text on a web page in relation to the HTML codes required to display the texts. It must be understood that HTML codes are programmed to display web contents such as texts, images, videos and other graphics. Every content displayed to users generates backend codes to be stable. The ratio of codes needed to display texts therefore is known as the text to HTML ratio.
How to Calculate Text to HTML Ratio
Website programmers and other internet experts agree that the best text to HTML ratio should be in the neighborhood of 25-70%. What this means is that 25% of HTML codes is ideal to produce 70% of visible and readable texts. Since Google’s Panda algorithm update, more importance is attached to content than codes. To this extent, the more the text content and other visible web features, the better it is for user experience.
This is very crucial today because search engines believe websites should be designed for people and not as much for search engines.
To calculate the text to HTML ratio for your web pages, you must compute the amount of text in your content paragraphs against the anchor texts in your website’s codes. The simplest way however to get this done is to use free online checker tools.
How This Ratio Impacts Your Website Performance
Website experts agree that your text to HTML ratios will not impact or affect your web ranking with search engines in any significant way. They however reveal how well you engage in positive SEO practices – factors that indirectly impact search rankings.
Please note that web pages with heavy codes behind them confuse search engine bots or crawlers as to the exact information for the page. Where HTML codes are too many for a page, crawlers have very little information to go on with in determining the user-readable content for that page. Also, pages with heavy codes load slowly when searched or navigated, affecting user experience and ultimately affecting ranking factors.
Other Important Information
It is a good idea to improve the text to HTML ratio for a website by applying the following tips:
- Build websites to improve user experience and not just to rank higher in search engines
- Increase your website loading speed by using lesser codes
- Help search engine crawlers to index your pages better and faster by raising the texts over the HTML codes
- JavaScripts, flash, tables, comments, large images, large tabs and spaces must all be removed or minimized to enhance user experience and reduce codes
- Use less of internal links and ensure they are indexable and dofollow at all times
- Texts that are not visible to people but seen only by search engines must be removed
An advice to web designers and programmers: excessive use of design elements and colorful fascinations may be attractive to users, but not necessarily to search engines. So user experience must not be sacrificed for page design and elements.