How to Enable Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs

Written by Scott Greenwald Posted in Joomla Tutorials, SEO Tips

In this quick video tutorial, you'll learn how simple it is to enable Joomla's SEF URL feature. Many people don't know that the latest version of Joomla has powerful SEO features built right in to the core. However, these settings are not always enabled by default.

What are Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs? Basically, SEF means urls that are human-readable, ommiting the ugly parts like index.php?catid=43&itemid=76, for example, and replacing them with descriptive, human-readable words.

The process is simple. In the Joomla administrator, the SEO settings are located in Site > Global Configuration. Look at the SEO Settings box on the right side of the page.

The three main settings we're concerned with are:

Search Engine Friendly URLs: Yes
Use URL Rewriting: Yes
Add suffix to URL: No

Notice the second option "Use URL Rewriting". Setting this to Yes requires you to change the name of a file that is located in the main folder where Joomla is installed. This must be done outside of Joomla, usually in your web hosting account file manager. (explained in the video).

In short, you'll need to rename the file called "htaccess.txt" to ".htaccess" (without the quotes). Notice the dot at the beginning of the file name, this is very important.

Make sure to watch the video above for more details. It's only 3 minutes long, and I go over the entire process of setting up SEF in Joomla, step by step.

As always, If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below and I'll do my best to help. And many thanks for sharing this tutorial if you found it useful.

Tags: Joomla how to, Joomla tutorial, seo
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About the Author

Scott Greenwald

Scott Greenwald is a web development professional, with roots in front-end UI design. He's been a Joomla addict since 2007, and a contributing author to the Joomla! Community Magazine. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Joomla tutorials! Scott on Google+

Comments (5)

Joe McGovern

10 January 2013 at 15:26 | #

Thanks for this Scott.
So the index text should drop off then ? I am using joomla 1.5 I checked the seo friendly box; and the next check boxs which flags a warning apache users. Should the above work for 1.5 as well. Not working for me !
just cannot access the server
cheers,
joe

reply
- Scott Greenwald
  
  10 January 2013 at 22:19 | #
  
  Joe, did you rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess ?
  
  reply
  - Joe
    
    11 January 2013 at 13:37 | #
    
    Thanks Scott. Just revisted this and its working perfectly. Thank you!
    Joe
    
    reply
Behzad

28 January 2013 at 20:11 | #

Hi Scott,

Any way to remove the Article IDs from the urls without SEF extensions?

Mysite.com/9-about-fact/about/3-families-and-communities-together
change to:
mysite.com/about-fact/about/families-and-communities-together

thanks!

reply
- Scott Greenwald
  
  28 January 2013 at 22:49 | #
  
  I have never tried without an SEF extension. If you are good with Apache and .htaccess, then you may be able to create custom url rewrites. But, this is an impractical solution if you have lots of urls.
  
  reply