SEO blog

Text to Code Ratio: Does it really matter?

If you at all read webmaster forums you’ve likely stumbled upon a posting stating that a good code to content ratio is imperitive good search engine rankings. While in theory this sounds good, however in applicatation it is pretty easy to see that this is a fallacy, at least in terms of the major 3 search engines.

Doing a search for “Google”, as a an example in any of the search engines will point us to Google’s home page. If you’ve visited Googles home page, you’ve noticed the severe lack of text, and upon viewing the souce code for the Google home page you can see that there is much more code than text.

Ok, so Google is a monster; we’ll choose another subject. Try searching for “Auto insurance” in Google. It’s a pretty popular search term with almost 44 million results in the SERPS - and the number one page, geico.com, has very little text on it: again there is significantly more coding than content.

I guess to make my point, we can take it straight from the mouth of Vanessa Fox of Google as reported by Web Pro News:

“This point I’ve seen crop up so many times, and each and every time I say - it does not matter! One of my first sites was created in Frontpage with absolutely shocking code and it ranks fine, even for searches with 100 million+ results.

The good word = Google ignores code to text ratio. . . “

So - take is straight from the mouth of Google, and do your own research and see the results. Do a search for a very popular search term in any major search engine, check out the results and view the source code for these top ranking pages. You’ll find that in terms to text to code, it really doesn’t matter in regards to your websites rankings.

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16.Mar.07 General Comments (0)

It’s not all about Google

Yes - Google still handles the bulk of global search engine searches. . . meaning that, theoretically - they can deliver more traffic to your website than any other engine.

However, there is a lot more to a website’s life than Google; at least there should be.  There is an immeasurable amount of website traffic to be gained from these “lesser”, often ignored, search engines.  Specifically: Yahoo!, MSN & Ask.  I’m guilty of it, I know.  My homepage is Google and when I search - that’s what I search from.  I guess you could say I’m pretty ignorant as to what makes these other search engines tick - and I expect there are a lot of other hobbyist webmasters that are, too.

I stumbled upon this long, but immensely enlightening, piece on the seobook.com website: “Google vs Yahoo! vs MSN: Comparing Search Algorithms“.  If you’ve got the Google Blinders on - this is a highly recommended read to open your eyes up to some of the inward workings of other major search engines.

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27.Jan.07 General Comments (0)

How to find new SEO clients

As a long time subscriber to the newsletter put out by webpronews.com I often receive solid  information, as well as interesting opinions pertaining to the seo industry, or even just search engine industry in general.

The latest post I read from webpronews is no different - covering tips on how you can go about finding new seo clients.  It is a good read, and if your are in the seo industry, or even just toy around with it - this post will give you solid info on how to go about it.

Here’s the link: Looking for SEO Clients?

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19.Jan.07 General Comments (2)