Increase Your Site’s “CTC” Ratio

When search engines crawl a Website, one of the metrics they use in determining a page’s relevance and rank is called the Content to Code Ratio. Search engines calculate the ratio of a site’s content in relationship to the programming code on each page. Increasing your content to code ratio will help improve your search engine rankings and reduce your page loading times.

Simple Tactics to Increase Your Content to Code Ratio

The easiest method to increase your content to code ratio is to simply add more content. By adding a paragraph of two to each page on your site you can quickly increase this ratio.

Move JavaScript or any other script files from the source code into an external file. If this is not possible, try and move the scripts to the bottom of the page, leaving your content as close to the top of the page as possible.

Convert any on-page styling into an external Cascading Style Sheet. Effectively using CSS style sheets will allow you to replace tables with div’s and remove styles (font size, color, height, width, ect.) from the source code. Converting to div layout will allow you to place you main content first on the page, and using external CSS will significantly reduce the amount of code on each page.

Content to Code Ratio Examples:

1. www.seochat.com- 14.51%
2. www.seomoz.org – 30.39%
3. www.amazon.com – 6.49%
4. www.apple.com – 11.69 %
5. www.michiganacting.com – 20.27 %
6. www.wikipedia.com – 17.92 %
7. www.webworkshop.net – 33.13 %

Analyze your Website with this free Content to Code Ratio Tool

“Content is King” so the higher the content to code ratio, the more relevance your Website will achieve in the search engines. As a general rule, your content to code ratio should be 15% or higher.