What Is Text to HTML Ratio?
Firstly it’s worth explaining text to HTML ratio. All websites have a certain amount of backend code and a certain amount of standard text visible from the front end – the text to HTML ratio is in relation to this.
Why Is It Important?
At the start of 2011, Google updated its ranking algorithm (called Panda) to lower the rank of low quality sites and improve the ranking of higher quality and content rich sites in a bid to make search results more useful. A lot of news and social media sites began to improve in rankings and generally sites with a fair amount of text to HTML ratio began improving in rankings.
What’s best practice?
Whenever there are changes to Google’s algorithm, there are always a bunch of black hats who try and exploit it in some capacity and this was no different with the Panda update. With text to HTML, the ideal ratio is generally considered to be between 25 and 70%. Pages below 25% are generally looked at to be too low in text content and if your site falls in this category it’s worth adding more content which is relevant to your brand if possible. Websites which have a higher than 70% ratio of text over HTML are likely to be considered spam by Google (as it’s unlikely to be natural).
How To Do It
A simple step is to keep builds clean and remove any unnecessary code, remove unneeded white spaces and avoid tables! Also try and create a strategy for creating content for your site – most businesses would benefit from creating content relevant to their brand on their site.