This work suggests an optimized improved power rate sliding mode control (PRSMC) to control a 4-degrees of freedom (DOF) manipulator in joint space as well as workspace. The proposed sliding mode control (SMC) aims to improve the reaching mode and to employ an optimization method to tune the control parameters that operate the robotic manipulator adaptively. Inverse kinematics is used to obtain the joint desired angles from the end effector desired position, while forward kinematics is used to obtain the real Cartesian position and orientation of the end effector from the real joint angles. The proposed enhancements to the SMC involve the use of the hyperbolic tangent function in the control law to improve the reaching mode. Added to that, particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used to tune the parameters of the improved SMC. Furthermore, the Lyapunov function is utilized to analyze the stability of the closed-loop system. The proposed enhanced sliding mode combined with the optimization method is applied experimentally on a 4-DOF manipulator to prove the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed controller. Finally, the performance of the suggested control scheme is compared with the conventional power rate SMC in order to demonstrate the enhanced performance of the suggested method.