Advantages and Method of Creating Search Engine Friendly URLs for Joomla Content Management System

   Among the several customisations available a very important one is the creation of Search Engine Friendly URLs. Here I will describe how you can create URLs which are visitor as well as search engine friendly and the advantages of creating them. For this i have illustrated the same using Joomla 5

Creating Search Engine Friendly URLs in Joomla 5

   Joomla Content Management system can be customised to provide URLs which are not only Search Engine Friendly but also visitor friendly. By default the URLs provided by Joomla Content Management system are something like this in case of Content Items: http://<NameOfDomain>/ index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4&Itemid=105. These URLs are very long and it is quite obvious that they have been created dynamically.
   Such URLs are not search engine friendly. Likewise they are not visitor friendly, as a site visitor will find it extremely difficult to remember such an URL.

On the other hand building a very large static site manually (By creating HTML pages) involves a lot of work to maintain the website.
   It Would be very nice if we could find a solution to this problem. Well using an extension (Component) to Joomla solves all our problems. Our website can be maintained easily using Joomla and outwardly it will appear to site visitors as well as search engines as a Static Site (HTML site) with very friendly URLs. The additional benefit will be that these SEF URLs will also help to boost the placement of the site in the search results. In the screenshot below we can see The SEF URL of the Joomla website.
  

Generation of Search Engine Friendly URLs

   The full URL is generated by the SEF Component in Joomla by taking the page title by default. Since the title is usually long comprising of about 10 to 12 words and the maximum recommended length of a page filename should be no more than 3 words, we have to specify a Title Alias and the SEF Component built in the Joomla 5 core will use the Title Alias instead of the Title when generating the HTML file name for the URL. The settings in the Global Configurations (SEO section) have to be configured first. This is illustrated in the screenshot below.
  

  

   On an actual site the URL will be of the form http://<NameOfDomain>/danish-seo-case-study.html, which is clearly is a very friendly URL and much easier to remember than something like http://<NameOfDomain>/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4&Itemid=105.

SEF And Non Search Engine Friendly URLs comparison

   Finally we shall compare SEF And Non Search Engine Friendly URLs .The screenshot of both the types of URLs is shown below.
  

Other Customizations

   For more customisations please refer to Joomla Features.
  

About The Author

Joseph de Souza is a leading Freelance SEO consultant and Web developer in Goa, India with more than 17 years of experience in internet marketing.
He has a proven track record and has has helped several companies increase their traffic many times over and thereby increase their revenue and profits.
Besides English, Joseph has also successfully optimized two German language websites and a Danish language website and obtained outstanding results.