Is Your Code To Content Ratio Hampering Your SEO?

One of the factors that search engines look at when indexing and ranking a site is the ratio of code to content. Pages that are bloated with code are less likely to perform well in an SEO campaign than the same page with less code (presuming all else was equal). While the code to content ratio does need to be extremely high before being detrimental, it raises several other problems.

Spiders only index a certain amount of data from a page. For the majority of pages this really isn't a problem because the limit is high, but a page with a lot of code throughout may cause the search engines to ignore content that is found later in the page. If all of the code for a page is situated at the beginning of that page then there's the possibility that the search engines won't even consider your on page content.

Search engines are believed to consider many on page factors, including determining how much of your SEO content features above the fold. The more prominent your SEO optimised content, the more successful your SEO campaign is likely to be.

Other factors related to pages with high code to content ratio include page download time and errors. A longer than necessary page download time will detract from your overall SEO effort and will put certain visitors off before they even view your site. Plus, the more code that is found on a page, the more likely it is that the page will contain errors that prevent the proper indexing of the content.