Rewriting URL’s with Joomla

Online Business

I’ve been playing around with Joomla for a couple of weeks now and was looking to optimize the site I was developing for the search engines. A couple of areas that can be improved is the on page optimization. By this I’m talking about ensuring that each content item you create has a good title, you fill in the meta-data sections, as well as changing the templates if necessary to ensure that things like H1 tags are wrapped around page titles.

Another key area I looked at was with the way url’s are constructed. The default url’s out of the box with Joomla are dynamically created with section and content id’s in them (full of ampersands, questionmarks and meaningless id’s).

There is SEF functionality that comes out of the box with Joomla. This creates urls that are a bit more readable, as they are in the format similar to /section/content, but it doesn’t quite generate the best url’s (working on the assumption that keywords in a url are useful for seo purposes).

I therefore installed a third-party component called OpenSef. This creates urls that can have your section, category and page titles in the url. For example if I’m writing a page about the Dumbo Ride at Magic Kingdom, I can get a url that looks like this:

sitename/magic-kingdom/park-rides/dumbo-ride.html

This works great out of the box using Joomla 1.0.7, but for 1.0.8, you have to uncomment the “Begin 3rd Party or Core SEF Section” section in the .htaccess files. If you want to use url rewriting it’s important to get it working from the start, or you’ll have to re-visit all the links you may have created in your content.

You can get OpenSef at http://www.open-sef.org/

notsorich @ April 5, 2006