Along with all the meta tags, keywords, relevant content and headers that you add to optimize a website, creating search engine friendly urls help with optimization too. By Google, Bing, and any other search engine being able to search your website and your readable, relevant urls will benefit your optimization.

 
Working in Joomla, you have the option to choose SEO settings. In my experience I have found that you can’t just click the radio button to choose search engine friendly URLs. There are a few steps you must do prior to that, and the order of the steps does matter.

First the htaccess.txt file needs to be renamed to .htaccess ,a simple,necessary change. I use FileZilla but however you FTP to your site will work. If you are unsure how to use FTP (file transfer protocol) I recommend checking YouTube for a good tutorial relevant to the software you are using. Once the file is renamed we can then go to the back-end of the Joomla website. Head to Site/Global Configuration. On that page are Site Settings, Metadata Settings, and SEO Settings. In the SEO Settings box you have three areas Search Engine Friendly URLs, Use Apache mod_rewrite, and Add suffix to URLs. Choose ‘Yes’ on Use Apache mod-rewrite and ‘Yes’ on Search Engine Friendly URLs.
 
Having completed all three of these steps should set your website up to have search engine friendly URLs. Open your website and go through all menu items and links to confirm the change is working. In the address bar you should have readable names that correlate with the way your website is set-up. However with plug-ins and components sometimes these steps do not work. Therefore I am suggesting you confirm the changes are working correctly for your website.

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