United Worx Blog

Most forums have a “Please Review My Site” section. One of the more common suggestions I find myself making in these reviews is “Reduce your code bloat”. Code bloat is a condition where the underlying code of a web page contains much more code than content. The idea here is if you increase the percentage of content contained within the code, it will be easier for the engines to locate and index that content.

There are a number of ways to improve your “C2C Ratio”.

The most beneficial would be to add more content to the page that does not require additional code to support its placement on the page. Additional paragraphs of text would be preferable to unordered list of links and provide the additional benefit of more textual content to index.

Removing script code (JavaScript) from a page to an external file is another easy way to reduce code bloat. If for some reason a script can not be removed to an external file, you can place it at the bottom of the code right before the tag. This will at least allow your content to appear first in the code above the script. If you are worried about breaking the script by moving it, don’t. It is rare that a script on the page will not work if moved, especially with JavaScript.

Extensive use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is another great way to reduce your code bloat. This is true ONLY if you use an external style sheet not on page styling. Almost any attribute that can be applied to a can be assigned to the tag in a style. For example, there is no reason to add “border=0, cellpadding=2, cellspacing=5, backgroundcolor=”#ffffff” margin=5px etc. etc.” to a tag, when “class=table1″ will do the same thing. CSS can do great things for a web site when it comes to reducing the C2C Ratio. Learn it and use it.

If you use a imagemap to create a number of links on an image, find another way to add those links to the page. If you need to use a complex sitemap, consider using a flash version of your image. An example might be a map of the United States with each state a click-able link. Linking code is built into the Flash file and will not require that bulky sitemap in your code. Flash only requires a couple of lines of code to be inserted into a page. Additionally, you have a better chance of getting those links spidered using Flash than you do using a sitemap. While some engines are beginning to follow links within a Flash file, none follow the links within a sitemap.

There is no specific target ratio of content to code that has been identified. However, common sense tells us that the higher the percentage of content the better. The old adage “Content is King” is applicable even in your source code.

http://www.appliedseo.com/archives/improving-your-%E2%80%9Ccontent-to-code-ratio%E2%80%9D/