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