Text to HTML Important ?

[jmurphy7]

I'm trying to find out if the text to html % is really that important ? We run an e-commerce site & I'm trying to push for a redesign of a responsive website, with more images and make it more appealing to the customer, but another member of the company doesn't like the idea of more attractive website and just wants to flood the website with text and keeps saying about the text to html ratio. Is this a really important factor or would a more appealing 'lookwise' website be better ?

Cheers

[TakeshiYoung]

That probably means they just have less html code, since it's a ratio (text/code).

Text to code ratio has no impact on SEO, and I'm surprised some SEOs still obsess over it. If you have an incredibly code heavy page, Google may have trouble crawling it, but that's more about the sheer amount of code vs any kind of ratio.

That being said, you should try to keep your html code to a minimum, as excess code will increase the file size of your page, leading to a longer load time which is a poor user experience and can have a negative impact on rankings.

[jmurphy7]

Thanks for the reply. I generally thought that was the case and it wasn't a major factor like he is making out. Whilst analysing our text to html ratio and comparing it to other websites such; I've noticed on appearance they don't seem to have a lot of text present but have a much better ratio than ours ... any idea why this is ?

[dotfly]

In general the "text 2 html" ratio is smaller within a shop. This is just because of its business nature. You know that there are more than 200 ranking factors and that text is still a very important one BUT its not the only one that should fit.

User experience (you refer to responsive design), page speed and much more is also very important, especially in an e-commerce environment! If you just do a good job by creating unique article descriptions than youve done the best according to the text 2 html ratio within a shop system. There are several ways to push that by having a blog or using customer feedback on articles and services but I wouldnt do more than that. The rest should be done on the html basis, social media, adwords or whatever else...