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Wordpress Text to HTML Ratio Problem

by Paul Tovey
11 replies
  • SEO
    • |
My theme seems to be pretty HTML trigger happy and even with 1,180 words on my page my text to HTML ratio seems to be at a pretty low 24.92%.

Will these cause me an SEO problem?
(I'm fairly sure it will)

Also, do you guys know of any way to help this?
(Plugins etc).

Cheers!
#html #problem #ratio #text #wordpress
  • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
    Okay I confess. this one is news to me. HTML to text ratio for SEO? The only thing I would worry about is if the theme was messing with my tags or was slow loading.
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    • Profile picture of the author Paul Tovey
      It is? That is unusual.
      I know that your very experienced at SEO so i'm more inclined to go with your thoughts of 'That shouldn't matter'.

      Although, I have seen many mentions of text to code ratios being a bad thing.
      Yoast, SEO Quake, Site Beam, WordPress SEO plugin, Seo Moz etc.
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      • Profile picture of the author Paul Tovey
        Thanks for your input Mike, much appreciated.
        I figured something similar, thought it was best to clarify with some warriors.
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        • Profile picture of the author scott g
          I've never been a big fan of Wordpress in terms of SEO ... Don't know why. I think Wordpress and other CMS platforms clog up the pipeline with a lot of unneeded junk/filler code.

          This is also just my opinion, but I don't see how that could be beneficial or helpful in any way whatsoever to any site... Does it hinder it? Hmmmm...

          Build two identical sites (duplicate blah blah whatever doesn't matter): one on Wordpress and one in HTML and see which ranks higher, faster, with the least amount of work/effort.

          I believe HTML is easier to completely tweak and optimize, less junk, less filler. I have several static HTML sites that rank without any Off-site work. I don't know if it 's the theme I built, the PERFECT On-site optimization, or a mixture of both.

          But I do believe Googlebots like clean, easily crawlable code... My HTML is CLEAN and extremely lightweight. And those sites, like I said, rank with ZERO Off-site effort.

          Very similar Wordpress sites are outperformed by my HTML sites hands down. Wordpress is easy though... You want something then you add a plugin and it adds more filler code to your site.

          (Or you can build these features into the site yourself (but that's not as easy))

          (Or go edit the plugins files and delete the code that inserts the filler into you theme)

          Good luck!

          CHEERS!
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          scott g
          "Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve."
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  • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
    Well... who knows? I am not an employee for Google. I will just tell you that the ratio is one thing but if the code is valid, easily crawlable then I've never encountered it as a significant problem.

    Now if the code is seriously bloated then that does raise the possibility of their being one of those problems but not necessarily a fixed ratio.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Wordpress Text to HTML Ratio Problem
    That's not even a real thing (Text to HTML Ratio).

    If your adding unnecessary HTML tags to your source code that still has nothing to do with the text.

    You can validate the HTML (link), even If all the tags don't validate it won't cause a page to not rank.

    Like already said, you don't want a bunch of bloated code.

    The worst thing I've ever seen (not even joking) as far as bloated HTML source code was themes created with Artisteer, the finished HTML code was so bloated with unnecessary HTML tags, I couldn't believe the pages even loaded in the browser.
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    • Profile picture of the author Ralf Skirr
      2 tips to reduce bloated code:

      1. Use Yoast's SEO for wordpress plugin and check the 'clean up the head' feature in the 'titles & metas' section of plugin settings.

      2. Don't use bloated themes or even frameworks that add tons of unecessary code. Most code on your wordpress page comes from the theme, not from wordpress itself. Switching to well programmed themes will reduce your code instantly.
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  • Profile picture of the author Cosmit
    Originally Posted by Paul Tovey View Post

    My theme seems to be pretty HTML trigger happy and even with 1,180 words on my page my text to HTML ratio seems to be at a pretty low 24.92%.

    Will these cause me an SEO problem?
    (I'm fairly sure it will)

    Also, do you guys know of any way to help this?
    (Plugins etc).

    Cheers!
    If you think your % is low, try Google's: Code to Text Ratio : 0.78 %

    I have no idea where you get your information from but unless you have megabytes of HTML that it makes loading your page nearly impossible, why on earth would something so trivial matter?Why would search engines care about how much HTML code you have? If I were designing a search engine I'd think more HTML is a good sign, probably a better user experience. But I wouldn't punish or reward based on that.As long as your HTML is valid, why worry about such trivial things??
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  • Profile picture of the author Cosmit
    Originally Posted by jacksarloks View Post

    If you need more answer mine is that your worrying about onpage optimization is a prob. Onpage optimization stuff like that is useless... Google does not care whether it's 24% , 33% , etc just make sure your website is fine for your visitors, if they like it, search engines will too.
    On-page optimization worked in 1998. Nowadays most of the on-page optimization is done by plugins. As long as your page has a title, nothing else really matters. I've had people offer to help me rank websites by doing "on-page optimization". That essentially tells me they have not ranked a page in their life.
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    • Profile picture of the author Paul Tovey
      I am aware that it's not a big deal, but I did notice it popping up in in well known applications like Yoast, SEO Quake, Site Beam, WordPress SEO plugin and read an article in Seo Moz from only last year, so I was curious.
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