Worth Modifying Code to Have Text Appear Near Top

[Kingalan1]

Our site uses Wordpress. The code is somewhat heavy. The text to code ratio for the home page is only 16%.

Our developer suggests that we modify the code so that the important text appears at the top of the page (without changing the design) so that Google can index it more easily. My developer feels this would be more beneficial for SEO. He believes that reducing the code would create HTML errors. The home page is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com

Is this approach sound?

My developer describes it in the following manner:

| Let me say that I don’t believe the text to code ratio has a significant impact on SEO per se but of course that reducing code, it will reduce page weight therefore it may help to improve ranking.

See Homepage for example, this is the top landing page of your site, therefore it is very relevant to optimize. You can see the first block, from attached it has very little content and too many code. There is almost nothing to do about it, visually that is a very good block, in terms of SEO it isn't. I do not recommend to take it off just for SEO, that will make all pages with lot of text, lack of images and people may go away.

On the other hand, most of the cases we want to improve text code ratio, there is an impact on unexpected BUGs because the code is being changed and this may affect functionality.

I would suggest to spend time on improve the sort-order of the important content inside the code, so we may have similar text code ratio at the end but the important code we need Google to index will be at the very top in the source code, in terms of a very technical approach Google will find the key content faster and that should help to improve the crawling process as search engines read HTML code linearly. This change do not necessarily will affect the HTML, we can achieve it by using style sheet (CSS code) instead, reducing the chance of major BUGs.

Either is our choice, we need to evaluate potential problems, code issues and content impact and also we need to apply changes and wait at least 3-4 weeks to start seeing results. It is a long task.

Let me know your thought about this, we will estimate a task to improve code without affect web design |

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

Text > HTML ratio isn't actually a ranking factor and there is no penalty based on this. What you can do with it, is use it as an indicator on how big your pages are and identify those that might be slowing do the loading.

There is no test or correlation that would suggest that reducing this text > HTML ratio will do anything for your rankings.

You need to also try and get away from the thought process that SEO is just about search positions - you need to think about customer acquisitions and page usability as well. For example, if I look at your home page and you were to just add a block of text at the top, then this would reduce the effectiveness of the big messages and search availability at the top. it would push down the main search box and offer nothing of use that anyone would really want to read.

So no, don't add text to the top of the page as this isn't needed. If this were just one big picture with nothing at all there, then it might be a different discussion.

Are your search positions dropping at the moment, or is there a reason that this came about?

I have clients whose Text > HTML ratio is 6-8% and in 1st position for very highly sought after terms. There is a lot more at play.

-Andy