Search Engine Friendly urls

This tutorial will guide you through setting up the SEF - Search Engine Friendly urls for the latest version of Joomla 1.5

By default Joomla will produce URLs which look like this

As you can see the default URL includes the PHP string, component name plus a number of parameters which don't look to good to search engines or your visitors.

Enabling the built-in SEF functionality offers the following advantages

• It will make it easier for other web sites to link directly to the SEF article rather than to the default URL generated by Joomla!
• Visitors are more likely to remember the short easy to read SEF URL
• Provides the visitor and search engines with useful information about the article title and the section, category.
• You can include targeted keywords in the URL which reference the section, category and article title which may help improve your search engine position in Google, Yahoo and Bing
• Can resolve the issue where your template is displayed on the front page but not on other pages

The above are just some of the benefits of using SEF Urls.

What will you need to setup the search engine friendly urls

• Access to the Joomla Administrator area
• FTP Access to rename and update the htaccess.txt file included with the default installation of Joomla!
• Your web site is hosted on a linux platform, this tutorial does not cover IIS

Step 1 : Rename Htaccess.txt file

The first step is to rename the htaccess.txt file located in the root of the public_html or home directory where you have installed Joomla!. To do this log into the web site using your FTP client and rename the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess

Step 2 : Configuration.php file permissions

In order to change the SEO settings you will need to ensure the Joomla! configuration.php file is writable.

To make the configuration.php file writable complete the following

1. Log into the web site using your FTP client and browse to the Joomla installation
2. Select the configuration.php file and change the file permissions from CHMOD 644 to CHMOD 777

STEP 3 : Setup Joomla SEO settings

1. Log into the Joomla! administrator area
2. Select the Global Configuration icon
3. You will now see the following SEO setting
4. To save the SEO settings select the APPLY button

4. Each setting you select from the above will produce a different result.

5. If you enable the " Search Engine Friendly URLs" option

6. The URL will look like this and include the .index.php name in the URL

7. Using the above method may break the template layout  "your design displays ok on the front page but not on other pages"

8 . If you enable both the "search engine friendly URLs" plus "Use Apache mod_rewrite"

9. The URL will look like this and produce a clean easy to read URL.

10. If you enable all 3 of the above settings

11. The URL will display a .html suffix

If you want search engine and human friendly URLs we recommend you choose both the "search engine friendly URLs" plus "Use Apache mod_rewrite" options.