Using a Sitemap to increase your Page Rank & rank higher on Google

Correctly utilising your internal links in a website can be a very powerful way to increase your link popularity and also Page Rank for the sub-pages within your website. There are several ways that you can increase the Page Rank of your internal pages, but perhaps the easiest method is by including a Sitemap into your website. Sitemaps have been standard web design practice for a long time but these days you will find that a lot of websites or web designers are simply leaving them out. I will briefly get into some of the ways that you can utilise sitemaps to improve the Page Rank of your internal pages and ultimately boost your websites ranking on the search engines.

Making sure that all your pages are linked together is a very important part of search engine optimisation as it enables the Search engine spider to correctly trawl all of the pages that are in your website. By including links to all your sub-pages in your website you are giving the search engine a prompt to visit that page and include it in their database and the more pages that you can get the search engine to include in their database the better. Websites that have a correctly optimised internal linking structure will usually have a good distribution of Page Rank throughout their entire website. If you have ever checked a websites Back Links and noticed that they are all coming from their own website, this is generally the result of a well optimised internal linking structure.

There are several different methods that you can use to help increase the Page Rank of your internal pages by utilising your internal links more effectively. What I am going to discuss here, and one of the easiest ways practices of search engine optimisation there is the use of a Sitemap. If you do any research into search engine optimisation you will find that they all encourage the use of a Sitemap. The reason for this is twofold. First, it will make your website easier to navigate from the end-user perspective as they can use the sitemap to find exactly what they are looking for quickly and easily. Secondly, it will also direct the search engines to visit all the sub-pages in your website.

There are two main types of Sitemap that the search engine spider will be looking for. There is the traditional HTML Sitemap that can be very effective by correctly utilising your Link Text & then there is the increasingly important XML Sitemap. The XML Sitemap can be easily created by utilising some of the powerful web applications that generate this for you automatically. This XML sitemap can then be uploaded via the Google Webmaster tools giving all the pages within your website every chance to be visited by Google's search engine spider.
Generally I would recommend utilising both sitemaps as they can both play slightly different roles in talking to the search engine that are going to turn into a big boost for your website in the search results.




Making a sitemap is one of the easiest ways to give a boost to your website not only in the search engines stakes but also in terms of usability for your customers. If you haven't got yourself a Web designer or you aren't tech-savvy then try the XML Sitemap option that can be generated automatically just by doing a simple search for an XML Sitemap Generator. The optimisation software by Apex Pacific, SEO Suite v8.0 also has a sitemap tool that is very handy. Once you have done this, you will be one step closer to getting your site to the top of the search engines.





Oliver Moran is a Senior Internet Marketing Consultant for Apex Reach. http://www.apexreach.com