When it is installed, Joomla creates page addresses that look like this:

While these addresses work find (and in fact, Joomla works best with this type of address>, these are not very “friendly” to human readers.  And some people feel that these types of addresses hurt your ranking in the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, etc.

As a result, many Joomla site administrators want to make their page addresses (or URLs – Uniform Resource Location) easier to read.   These are often referred to as SEF (Search Engine Friendly) or SEO (Search Engine Optimized) URSs.

Joomla Core SEF 

Joomla has a basic SEF / SEO tool built into it.  It will create page addresses that look like this in Joomla 1.0.13.

In Joomla 1.5, the "core" SEF tools will make the page address look like this:

That’s not bad, and certainly an improvement on the default Joomla address.

How do I turn on SEF URSs ?

To turn on this feature you have to do 2 steps:

• Enable this in your site configuration settings
• Rename a file in your Joomla root folder.

Let's take a look at these steps.  They will differ a bit depending on which version of Joomla you are using.

Step 1 in Joomla 1.0.13

The first step is to "turn on" SEO / SEF support in your Joomla Global Configuration.

Go to Site -> Global Configuration, and those the "SEO" tab.

On this tab, click on "Yes"  on the "Search Engine Friendly URLs" setting:

Now, notice the message there about renaming the htaccess file.  This is the next step that you will do after you <save> the changes to your configuration file. 

Step 1 in Joomla 1.5

If you are using Joomla 1.5, the steps are basically the same, but the screens will look slightly different.

On the "Global Configuration" screen, the SEF is controlled on the first page on the right side of the screen.

Step 2: (in both versions) Rename your htaccess.txt file to .htaccess

The next step is to rename a file in your Joomla root folder.  When installed, Joomla puts a file named htaccess in the root folder.  You need to rename that file to be .htaccess.  Generally this is done with your FTP program, but can be done through the file manager of your web host control panel.

Here is what it looks like before it is renamed:

And after it is renamed:

Once this file has been renamed, your "friendly" URLs should be seen when you go to your site.  You may have to "refresh" your page a few times to get them to appear.

 

Other SEF / SEO Alternatives 

But other 3^rd party extensions have been created to give even more control over the URLs.  These extensions are listed here in the Joomla Extensions Directory.

Some of these are free, and some of these are commercial extensions.  They can make a dramatic improvement in the appearance of your page addresses, so you end up with a page address like this in Joomla 1.0.13.

www.welcometojoomla.com/tips/easy-to-read-page-addresses or

www.welcometojoomla.com/contact/john

My advice?  Work on building your site first and then add an SEF extension a bit later in the process.  They can be tricky to configure and it is easy to let this distract you from developing the content of your site. 

And, if you are using Joomla 1.5, you may be very happy with the built in SEF ability and not need an additional tool.