CSS External

[jackson992]

I ran a tool last night and it says all my sites have a bad text to code ratio so was wondering how to do this. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

[stymiee]

There is no such thing as a bad text to code ratio. That's a bunch of conjecture that just isn't true. There are sites with massively complex table layouts that have lots of HTML and they rank very high for competitive terms. So you can safely ignore that report.

But, if you want to believe it, going to a tableless layout will reduce your code to content ratio as tables require a lot of code to organize content.

[jackson992]

So you don't agree with this site?

http://www.seoworkers.com/search-eng.../analyzer.html

Unfortunately all I know is tables so they have to stay LOL

[stymiee]

No. I don't. And you need to realize that just because someone published it on the Internet doesn't make it true. There are lots of sites with really crappy information about SEO. Anyone can publish anything they want to, correct or not. Even Aaron Wall is often times wrong and lots of people love to believe everything he says (much to their detriment).

[Webnauts]

Stymiee do you want to tell the member here that our experience and of the others like below is a bunch of crap?

Why is the Code to Text Ratio Important for SEO?

The code to text ratio of a page is used by search engines and spiders to calculate the relevancy of a web page. A higher code to text ratio gives you a better chance of getting a good page ranking for your page.

Maybe not all search engines are using the code to text ratio in their index algorithm, but most of them do. So having a higher code to text ratio than your competitors gives you a good start for on-site optimization.

And my question to you: Do search engines read the whole amount of a page? If yes, if your pages are filled with excessive HTML code, they will not see all the text content.

Some resources for further reading:
1. http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-En...ion-and-CSS/5/
2. http://alistapart.com/articles/seo
3. http://www.dot-seo.com/seo-tools/web...content-ratio/

Another on-topic discussion at WPW: http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=65403

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by jackson992

I ran a tool last night and it says all my sites have a bad text to code ratio so was wondering how to do this. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

By the way Jackson992, type in google's search box this: Text Content Ratio and SEO.

[CompuGeneration]

jackson992,

I haven't reviewed your site so I can't comment on it directly. However, code to content ratio WILL play a role in how well you rank in search engines. This may not weigh as heavily for sites with hundreds of thousands of pages, but it will make difference (however small/large).

Browsers parse your code and display pages according to their interpretation of html. Humans only get to see what their browser(s) display them.

Spiders read every single character of your code (just like browsers). The more code bloat you have, the bigger the file size. This takes the spider longer to index your page. We know that spiders spend only a finite amount of time on your website. The longer they take on one page the fewer amount of total pages they will be able to index on any given visit. Therefore, this will make a difference in your ability to rank well in the search engines.

Tableless design is definitely worth the effort and time involved to learn. Besides previously mentioned benefits it also helps to separate the work tasks more efficiently. I suggest checking out www.csszengarden.com to get a few examples of what can be accomplished with this design method.

[Webnauts]

Here is probably a cool experiement about this issue: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-En...nimal-Text./1/

[jackson992]

Hi guys:

I've been trying to get the css in an external file but for some reason I can't get it to work. It works for an ordinary include but not in the format of:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://jacksretail.com/right.css">

Site in question is http://jacksretail.com and I would like to eventually do this on all my sites, as according to the reports all my site have ppor text to code ratio.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by jackson992

Hi guys:

I've been trying to get the css in an external file but for some reason I can't get it to work. It works for an ordinary include but not in the format of:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://jacksretail.com/right.css">

Site in question is http://jacksretail.com and I would like to eventually do this on all my sites, as according to the reports all my site have ppor text to code ratio.

That is not a CSS file. You duplicated your html code and you named it right.css.

Sorry for asking, but are you a beginner in web design?

If yes, you must ask for help at the Graphics & Design Forums. This thread is in the SEO forums, and this issue is going off-topic. :)

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by stymiee

There is no such thing as a bad text to code ratio. That's a bunch of conjecture that just isn't true. There are sites with massively complex table layouts that have lots of HTML and they rank very high for competitive terms. So you can safely ignore that report.

I found and interesting article affiliated to this topic at Sitepoint. Here is the conclusion for the big three:

"Thus, this experiment established the fact that the leading search engines differ considerably in terms of the the amount of page text they're able to crawl. For Yahoo!, the limit is 210KB; for Google, 520KB; and for MSN, it's 1030KB. Pages smaller than these sizes are indexed fully, while any text that extends beyond those limits will not be indexed".

Source: http://www.sitepoint.com/print/index...here-bots-stop

So what about that?

[incrediblehelp]

I believe to the SE's Link to Text ratio is far more important than Code to Text ratio.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

I believe to the SE's Link to Text ratio is far more important than Code to Text ratio.

Jaan can you explain what you mean with Link to Text Ratio?

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Jaan can you explain what you mean with Link to Text Ratio?

Very simply having more out bound links on your page than relevant text. It seems this is is a big issue with Live Search (MSN).

Lots of industrial type websites run into this issue where the website is laid out great for end users but contain mostly links on each page (directory style) until you get to the product page.

For example browse through this website:

http://www.coleparmer.com/catalog/catalog_toc.asp?cat=1

You can see the pages have mostly links. They have tried to add some text describing each link to get around this issue.

[Webnauts]

Then you mean Link Text Quality...

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Then you mean Link Text Quality...

um, no

The amount of text in links compared to the amount that is not in links. Linked text to regular text ratio, to be more precise.

If you have a page full of links it is less likely to rank for much, comparable to page that is full of non-linked text. Pretty easy to understand. Hence the reason sitemap pages hardly rank for much.

This has nothing to do with the quality of the text whether linked or not.

[meinking22]

My estimation of the code to text ratio is that, at this stage, it is only relevant to your file size as Webnauts mentioned above. If your code pushes your file size over the brink, then it's doing you no good.

I seriously doubt that css makes a huge difference to SERPS at this stage simply because it still hasn't been embraced by all. For example, results for a search of "orange county real estate" only show half of the ranking sites using it: http://www.google.com/search?q=orang...e+Search&meta=

The 50% demonstrated above to me is a high number. I'm willing to bet that less competitive keyword phrases would turn up a larger disparity of css users.

However, I definitely do recommend use of css in your web design. The separation of content and design sure makes site administration a lot easier.

Steve

[jackson992]

Sitmap pages rank great. These are our highest ranking pages on every search engine. witho no text just the links leading to the corresponding page with their anchor text.