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How do I make my Joomla! (TM) pages Search Engine Friendly?
You will probably find that when you first start creating content for your Joomla! site that the URLs will look something like this:
http://www.joomlainformation.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6&Itemid=6
This is not very good if you want to get the Search Engines to find your web site.
Joomla! (TM) allows you to change this by using the Global Configuration page.
Click the Site Menu option
The Site Menu option will display
Click the Global Configuration option
The Global Configuration Page will display
You will notice on the right hand side of the page is the SEO Settings section
Select the Search Engine Friendly URLs Yes radio button. This takes away all the id information you can see displayed on our example URL above
Select the Use Apache mod_rewrite Yes radio button. (You will have to rename your htaccess.txt file - see below)
Select the Add suffix to URLS Yes radio button. This will add .html add the end of the page name
Click the Save icon at the top of the page
Please note that you may find that when click the Save icon that you get an error message telling you that Joomla! is unable to open the configuration.php file to write. This is normally due to permissions of this file being set to 755, in other words it doesn't have write permissions to be able to accept the changes.
Using your Web Development program or FTP program, login to your Web server.
Right click on the configuration.php file (I user Dreamweaver) and the Windows pop up menu option will display (In an FTP program you will have to follow instructions on how to change permissions on a file)
Select Set Permissions. You will see that the file permissions are set to 755
Change the permission setting to 777
Click OK
Go back to the Configuration page and follow my instructions displayed above
When you have changed the SEO Settings section make sure you change the Permissions of the configuration.php back to its original settings
You will now have to rename your htaccess.txt file:
Open your FTP program for your Joomla! (TM) website.
Login to your server and you will see in the root directory a file called htaccess.txt
Rename the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess (note you MUST include the leading dot and not have a file extension such as .txt)
You will now see that your Joomla pages will have search engine friendly names
If you want to get started quickly then Subscribe to my Free Joomla! Tutorials by clicking on the link below:
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