Must haves to Make Joomla SEF

If we are going to make Joomla Search Engine Friendly there are some things to take into account.

Joomla Basic SEF Needs
First of all, lets see if your hosting providers runs an Apache web server, since this is the most used web server application, changes are your oké.
To find out, just look at your Joomla Administrators Menu for “System” and choose “system information” and then “PHP Info” a few lines down is says “Server API” that should say Apache.

Just stay in this screen and scroll down, to check the next thing you need, which is an active “mod_rewrite”.
You will find a section called “Apache” and there is a field in that table “Loaded Modules” the “mod_rewrite” should be there.
If not, please mail your provider to ask for activation.

This Apache module takes care of transforming you cryptic URL’s to clean URL’s.
On making this work it uses a file called .htaccess

.Htaccess and Standard Joomla SEF
In you Joomla! root directory you will find a file called htaccess.txt, this has to be renamed to .htaccess
This file and the configuration option “Search Engine friendly URLs, on the SEO tab in your global configuration is the standard SEF for Joomla!

It will give you URLs like www.example.com/1/2/25/ instead of www.example.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=1&Itemid=2

You need to get this working first before we can make the next step on our way to good Search Engine Optimization.