HTML Code to Content Ratio

Checking your HTML code to textual content ratio is important as it will give you an idea of the percentage of content there is on your website when being viewed by a search engine. We have stated many times before that it's important to know what the search engines see to be able to make it more reader friendly in their eyes.

If Google goes to crawl your website and only finds coding, no actual content, then they won't know what topic the website is relating to or which keywords to rank your website against. This is related to the importance of content on your website and how content defines your website as discussed previously, but in proportion to the amount of code. All SEO specialists want the website they're optimising to be easy-reading for Google so they want to minimalise the amount of HTML code on each page. If there is lots of unnecessary coding on the website then search engines will not find it easy to crawl, it will take longer and the code will be irrelevant to the content the search engines are looking for. It's like sieving through a full inbox to find your emails through all the junk mail.

This is a tool to help you find out what your code: content ratio is;
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/code-to-text-ratio/

If your website has a very low percentage of content in the source code then you need to go through and clear that junk out, we will be giving more SEO tips on how to do this later on. If you are after some proof that this works then you can test it yourself, most of the websites ranking on the first page for 'Search engine optimisation' on Google have at least 30% content in their source code on the homepage of the website.