Search Engine Optimization With Sitemaps

I just wanted to share a little Search Engine Optimization experiment I ran to confirm the theory that Google likes content rich sitemap pages rather than just a bunch of links pointing to different pages on your site. I also wanted to look at a way of funnelling Google page rank to all the internal pages on my site as quickly as possible

I have heard from a few search engine optimization companies that sitemaps are good ways of helping search engine spiders find all the pages on your site but have you every thought that using good quality sitemaps can also help your internal pages attain a very high Google page rank very quickly

I was reading a Search Engine Optimization article about how Google likes pages with good quality relevant content and how they wanted to serve this quality content to their surfers. I decided to run a little experiment with sitemaps. I build two types of sitemap, one with just links to my article pages and the other with the same links but these links were also surrounded with relevant search engine optimized content.

Sitemap without search engine optimized content

http://search.freefind.com/find.html?id=85113844&m=0&p=0

Sitemap with search engine optimized content

http://www.search-engine-optimization-review.com/seo-sitemap-11.html

I created content rich sitemap with a neat bit of sitemap generating software that generates pages by using the title and description of your internal pages.

http://www.search-engine-optimization-review.com/sitemap.html

I started an aggressive reciprocal link campaign and my index page shot up to a PR 5 within 60 days.

http://www.search-engine-optimization-review.com Google page rank 5

Both types of sitemap pages gained a PR 4 but the funny thing was the pages that were linked from my content rich sitemap pages gained a PR3 but the sitemap pages with just text links to my internal pages were only a PR 1.

Six months after creating these sitemap pages the article pages linked from the content rich sitemap pages had attained a PR 5 but the article pages linked from sitemap pages that had just text links with no content had attained at the very best a PR 2.

I have come the conclusion that Google does like quality search engine optimized content rich pages and using these sitemap pages to funnel Google page rank to your important internal pages is a wise thing to do.

My advice is to build your sitemap pages with content surrounding the links to all your internal pages so they are only two clicks away from your home page.

Example Home page - Good content sitemap page - internal pages

If you have a lot of sitemap pages (I had over 20 with 100 links per page) create links from your home page using text links. For example instead of creating a link like Sitemap and sitemap2, sitemap3 etc Use keyword links to your sitemap pages like

Seo l Seo firm l Seo company l Seo New York l etc

One last thing, use RSS to feed up to date relevant content to your pages to keep the search engine coming back to gobble up your web sites pages.

Check out my spider page.

http://www.search-engine-optimization-review.com/cgi-bin/spider/spyderview.cgi

This software tells you when and where the search engines have visited your site

Keith Mallinson is author of the free, SEO Review internet marketing newsletter, offering subscribers up-to-date information on all aspects ofsearch engine optimization and internet marketing. His search engine optimization website offers unique, no BS information, for free