One of the first things I like to do after installing a new Joomla site is to activate search engine friendly (SEF) URLs.  SEF URLs are human readable addresses in your web browser for various web pages on a website.  Out of the box Joomla’s URLs have this basic format:

/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=26&Itemid=55

As you can see from the URL above, it’s hard to tell what the content of the page is about, however, with SEF URLs enabled, you can transform that URL into something more palatable for search engines, people and general good SEO best practices to something like this.

/latest-news-on-your-site

How to do it

There are a number of ways to execute SEF URLs in Joomla.  First, the server your site is hosted on must meet some basic requirements.  Ideally you want to be hosted on a Linux or Unix server running Apache with mod_rewrite enabled.  Mod_rewrite is a URL Rewriting Engine that allows for the nice transformation we saw in the example above.

The most basic way to activate SEF URLs is to go into Joomla Global Configuration, click on the site sub link and there you will see “SEO Settings”. For “Search Engine Friendly URLs” and “Use Apache mod_rewrite”, click yes to both. Note that you will also need make sure that you rename htaccess.txt at the root of your site to .htaccess, otherwise this will not work.

Paid extensions

If you want the ultimate in SEO / SEF URL goodness, you can try a paid extension like SH404SEF from Anything Digital Development. SH404SEF gives you a lot of control over how an SEF URL is formulated for any given page on your site. This is a just a fantastic component for Joomla and I highly recommend it as you have so much more control than just the native way of dong it using Joomla’s built in method. Of course with all the additional functionality comes more margin for errors occurring on your site. 

Third party SEF competent have often been criticized for being buggy. To a certain extent I agree with this so you just have to take care with your settings. However, I think with the most recent release of SH404SEF, many of the bugs I once encountered have been worked out, especially the now infamous pagination bug as it raltes to another popular Joomla extension, K2, a Content Construction Kit (CCK).

There are other third part SEF extensions for Joomla, the other standout being Artio JoomSEF

Resources

SEF extensions in the Joomla Extension Directory:
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/sef

Apache URL Rewriting Guide:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html

SH404SEF:
http://dev.anything-digital.com/Blog/Application-Development/give-your-site-a-seo-kickstart-with-sh404sef.html

Artio JoomSEF:
http://www.artio.net/en/joomla-extensions/joomla-seo-sef-component-artio-joomsef