Best web development practices
If you follow best practices when developing websites, your pages probably already have a high code-to-text ratio. However, if you are using an online website builder to generate your web pages, you might not be able to control this factor. Some of the best practices include using an HTML code validator, avoiding tables for your HTML structure, optimizing images for your page, and using JavaScript only if strictly necessary. These are all essential tips that can help ensure your web page is built to enrich your viewer’s experience.
Keep your code simple by using clean semantic HTML, external CSS and JavaScript files. This makes your website easier to maintain, improves load time, and enables the browser to render the page more efficiently. Basically, the less code on your page, the higher your text-to-code ratio is.
On pages that have a lot of graphics try to include text, such as introductory paragraphs and captions. It’s good to have a balance between text and images, large paragraphs of text should be broken up with images to give the viewer something appealing to look at while skimming the article.
How can I check my code-to-text ratio?
While building the pages on your site, be aware of your code-to-text ratio and be sure to create more content than code. There are a plethora of free online tools that you can use to evaluate the site when it is complete. These tools have their own algorithms for calculating code-to-text ratio, which will give you a variety of results depending on which you use. That being said, the best rule of thumb is to keep your code simple and clean.
While you should always be aware of code-to-text ratio, cramming large amounts of text on a page is not necessarily the best tactic to improve SEO. Some search engines do not include it in their algorithm, and human audiences, as well as search engines, tend to stop reading large blocks of text after the first three or four paragraphs. You might achieve more success by breaking down long passages of text into sub-pages, each one optimized for its topic.
We’re here to help.
You’ve already taken the first step: you’re informed. You know exactly what code-to-text ratio is, but you might need help fixing it. The team at My Website Spot wants you to know that we are available to help, reach out if you need us.
How do you ensure your code-to-text ratio is efficient? Do you have any questions or advice regarding code-to-text ratios? Have you found a good tool for calculating this? Don’t be shy, leave your thoughts in the comments below.
