Text to code ratio generally refers to how much of your webpage is text. A tool is typically used to extract the text from a paragraph as well as the anchor texts from HTML codes to find out the percentage ratio of text. It’s highly relevant to SEO because many search engines are known to use this information to gauge the relevance of a particular site. While not all search engines are particular about this detail as far as index algorithm is concerned, having more text in your pages is a good SEO strategy.

Finding out your site’s text to code ratio is a simple matter of using one of those online tools where you’ll be asked to enter your URL, hit enter, and see the data that you’re looking for.

So maybe it’s high time that you cleaned up your pages and made sure that you have fewer codes in them. There has been a lot of evidence that suggest that this practice can actually positively affect search engine rank.

The thing about having “cleaner” pages is that it makes it easier for search engines to identify whether or not your page is relevant for a particular search. For instance, using more semantic code to reduce the amount of HTML code in your page would allow the search engine spiders to find out what part of the page they stumbled into. It’s easier for them to know that they are looking at your header, which makes them think about relevance.

But then again, there are still a lot of people who are more inclined to believe that text-to-code ratio is not necessarily an essential ingredient to decent search engine rank. There are a lot of sites that actually rank good in various searches and yet they don’t really contain a lot of text in them. In an interview by WebPro News Vanessa Fox of Google said that this detail doesn’t really seem to matter a lot.

“This point I’ve seen crop up so many times, and each and every time I say – it doesn’t matter! One of my first sites was created in Frontpage with absolutely shocking code and it ranks fine, even for searches with 100 million+ results.”

Therefore, for Google at least, text to code ratio isn’t so important.

The middle ground in all this is that, no, it’s not so vital to SEO but the concept of cleaning up your codes in your pages is a good thing as it allows your pages to load better so you make both the search engines and your visitors happy.