Creative Online Marketing, Link Building and Ecommerce

I've written earlier about how finding and getting a Blog component to work in Joomla hasn't been the smoothest experience . I tried MojoBlog initially, then painfully switched over to MyBlog and spent a considerable amount of time making it work in my currents setup. One of my biggest pain points was that none of the Joomla Sitemap components would work too well with MyBlog - they would just not pick up the URL's. Anyone that knows anything about SEO knows that a sitemap is very important to make sure that Google crawls the right URL's with the right priority. If you have multiple websites in your shared hosting space, then it's even more important to tell the search engines what to crawl.

Xmap comes with extensions (plugins) for several major Joomla components. Make sure you check their list of plugins and make sure it has your major components that are installed or likely to be installed on your site. If not, then do not use Xmaps. It will not pick up your component's URL's which could be a deal breaker. In that case, your only choice is to look for another sitemap compeonent that might work with your specific component OR request that extension from either the maker of Xmap (who is really responsive btw) or your specific component developer. Or, if you are a developer yourself, you could write it and make it available to others in exchange from some bragging rights and free traffic from the Xmaps and related sites.

Here's what I did.

Step 1. Install Xmap 1.1 (which is the lastest version that works with Joomla 1.0.x. This is tested to work with 1.0.13 and 1.0.15

Step 2 - Download the My Blog Extension for Xmap

Step 3: To make it work with joomla 1.0.x, follow the instructions from the  page.

The source code as included here is compatible with Xmap 1.1 and Joomla 1.5. If you wish to use with J1.0, you'll need to modify the XML file in the ZIP as follows. Please note that I haven't performed any testing on J1.0, but I understand from other posters that it installs and works.

1. Extract the XML file from ZIP file contents
2. Modify the XML file from '' to ''
3. Not forgetting to edit the end tag from '' to ''
4. Save the file and update the ZIP file with the updated XML file
5. Install as instructions above

Step 4: Install the extension from within the Xmap's backend interface at Components > Xmap (not the regular Joomla backend installer)

Step 5: Under the Options > Preferences location, Xmap provides you with the links to the XML and HTML versions of the dynamic sitemap. Submit those to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer .

 You are all set. One of my sites ranked Page Rank 3 within one month of site launch and I think the fact that I submitted my sitemap to the search engines played an important role in that.