Many SEO experts are oblivious of the concept of text to HTML ratio. They even confuse it for a ranking factor! Let’s start by saying that it is not at all a ranking factor in terms of SEO. While it will not threaten the SEO of the website, it is simply a metric which will affect user experience.

People tend to to go overboard with the website design and development by addition various unnecessary elements to make the website look more lively and engaging. But in reality, they end up doing more harm than good! This might have a good impact to the visitors, but it is disastrous for search engine perspectives.

What is text to HTM ratio?

The pages of a website are written in HTML code, while the content displayed is usually in text. So to put it simply, text to html or code to text ratio is the ratio or percentage of backend coding to the text that is displayed on the frontend i.e. the content of the website.

What is the ideal ratio?

An ideal or optimal text to HTML ratio is anywhere between 25% to 75%, which means that the text of the website should be near to or more than 75%, while the coding should be restricted within 25%.

One can check the amount of text displayed to the HTML code either manually or automatically with the help of free checker tools. These tools extract the text from the website and anchor texts from the code to calculate the x% vs y% ratio.

How does it impact Google?

Having a low text to html ratio does not threaten or send any negative signals to Google. However, it affects user experience at large due to the following factors-

• A heavily coded website will lead to confusion amongst crawlers since they will not have sufficient text/information to show to relevant search queries on the search result pages. This will low-key impact SEO rankings.
• Low ratio will attract long page loading time, in turn affecting user experience, leading to increase in bounce and exit rates on the website.

In short, a good ratio will indirectly help SEO in the following manner-

• Showcase of relevant content on website
• Better User Experience
• Better Page Load Speed
• Better Indexing of Pages

How to optimise the ratio?

A good approach to fixing the ratio is acknowledging that modifications are required both in the coding as well as the text displayed. Correcting both go hand in hand to boost user experience. Here are some ways in which SEO experts can rework or  revise their text to html ratio.

Fixing ratio with respect to HTML coding

• Validation of HTML code- The HTML code needs to be valid. One can check this out with various free online tools.
• Reduction in HTML elements- Certain elements such as  JavaScript, tables, flashes, large white spaces, resizing images, etc should be reduced or eradicated.
• Page size- The size of the page should be best kept under 300kb to minify page loading time.
• Use of CSS- They should be used for styling and formatting of the website.
• Removal of invisible text- A page should contain simple readable text. Invisible texts should be done away with.

Fixing ratio with respect to Text

• Addition of more content- SEO experts should focus on increasing content by adding blogs to the website. This is a win-win situation from both, an SEO perspective as well as feeding content to users for better engagement and website loyalty.
• Labelling images- In layman terms, this simply means giving ALT attributes or alternative texts to images. Not only does an image get a label, but it also helps in ranking if labelled with proper keywords.
• Internal linking- SEO experts should link their content with related internal information to help users navigate within the website, in-turn also increasing the ratio of text to text.

The bottom line is that a simple and clean coding helps in achieving a good code to html ratio. So never forget that unless the website satisfies Google, one can’t score continual quality and quantity traffic.