If you looked at the code of some sites, you would see a mess. There are unnecessary pieces of code all over the place and it hinders the search engines ability to index pages.
Clean code allows the search engines to get to your content more quickly and index it better.
There are two considerations when cleaning up your code. The first is Keyword Prominence and the other Code-to-Text ratio, both of which are important to the search engines.
What is Keyword Prominence?
Keyword Prominence has to do with what line your content starts on in the code. The higher in the code your content starts, the better.
We had a client who had an old web site that had tons of code on it. The content for the site began at line 463. Our designer eliminated several hundred lines of code and the content eventually began at line 112, which the search engines loved. Within a couple months, our client was getting more than 4,000 searches a month, when before he was getting less than 100.
What is Code-to-Text Ratio?
Code-to-ratio is what the percentage of code compared to your content. The greater your percentage of content to code, the better. You should shoot for having a ratio of greater than 25 percent. A good place to check this is at www.seochat.com/seo-tools/code-to-text-ratio/.
We increased the code-to-text ratio on a client’s ecommerce site. Our client wanted to show up highly on a very competitive phrase, “bodybuilding supplements”. We deleted a lot of code and added more content to their front page. They moved from outside the top 50 listings to the front page of Google. At one point he was at #2 on Google and is still on the front page two years later.
How to Increase Your Keyword Prominence and Code-to-Text Ratio
The first thing you should do it get a good web designer or programmer who knows how to eliminate lines of code. They should work on a copy of your file so they don’t accidentally mess up the formatting of your page.
The first thing they should try is using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to move your content above the navigation in the code. Navigation can be a real code hog. Using CSS can also take the place of the code generated by using tables.
Your programmer can also use Javascript Includes to get rid of a lot of extraneous code and put them in an extraneous file. Dozens of lines of codes can be substituted with just one line of code. We’ve used this to eliminate hundreds of lines of code.
And the last way is just roll up your sleeves and go line-by-line to get rid of unnecessary code. Each line of deleted code helps.
Another way to increase the code-to-text ratio is simple — get more text. Don’t be afraid to write more content and put it on your page. It can be a quick win if you don’t have a good web designer at hand yet. I usually like to shoot for at least 450 characters of content on a page.
This is pretty technical way aid your search engine optimization but we’ve seen tremendous results by employing them. I would encourage you to get outside helps from someone very familiar with web site code.