The SEO refers to search engine optimization. The SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines. The SEO can also be referred to as SEF, or Search Engine Friendly.

The websites are considered search engine friendly when they can be easily found from them. By default Joomla uses dynamic URL. These URL are usually long and contain many parameters.

1. Advantages of SEF URL

The most significant advantages of SEF URL are these:

• They are short in length.
• They are readable and easily remembered by humans.
• They contain keywords.
• They don't "break" in blogs and emails.
• They are more accurately indexed by the search engines.

2. Before the Activation of SEO Functions

For Websites built with Joomla there is a built-in feature of Joomla which uses the extension mod_rewrite of Apache Server in order to re-write the URL. The Tip has been tested on version 1.5 of Joomla, the operating systems Windows and Linux, on which Apache Server was installed. The IIS Server of Microsoft is working differently in terms of URL re-writing, and it does not apply for this Tip.

Before you activate the Joomla SEO functions, you should check the following:

• Your web hosting provider allows you to use ".htaccess" files.
• Ask your web host if the extension mod_rewrite of Apache is already activated by them or should be enabled separately by you (inside the .htaccess file).
• Make sure that the "htaccess.txt" file, which is already included in the initial installation of Joomla, is in the "root directory", where you installed Joomla. If for some unknown reason you don't have the Joomla's default htaccess.txt file, you can download it from here: Joomla htaccess.txt file.