Text to HTML Ratio

[blackrino]

What's a good Text To HTML ratio for a website?

[tracowebb]

I agree with both but even so, it's not nice to cut a metric from tools if it's not wrong info, cause people who can comprehend the difference could deal with that.

[RyanKent]

Both Alan and Egol's views are valid.

Text to HTML should never be a consideration on it's own. At no point should you ever think "I need to cut back on my HTML code because there is not enough content to support it".

The important factors would be:

• Is your HTML coded valid? You can check your HTML at http://validator.w3.org/. Invalid html can cause issues for crawlers and users.

• As Alan suggested, is your code readable by crawlers? You can offer a beautiful Flash page, but if a crawler can't read it then you wont do well from a SEO perspective without the supporting HTML for non-Flash users and crawlers.

• Is your code efficient? You can use Page Speed or a similar tool to evaluate your page's loading speed. Many aspects of the speed will focus on the efficiency of the code.

[AlanBleiweiss]

I'd caution against assuming it's meaningless, but only from the perspective of not HTML specifically.  Instead, if a page is bloated with code at the source / crawler bot level, that can definitely have a negative impact, because it can cause topical confusion.  Whether the code is essentially gibberish to the human eye, or javascript with a lot of text that describes functions, calls and parameters.

I see such problems quite often on large sites that try to do a lot at the code level.

[EGOL]

In my opinion, text to HTML ratio is meaningless. You should do your best to have substantive content but it is highly unlikely that a search engine is going to evaluate you this way.