No doubt Joomla is a great content management system. This article covers how we can use joomla to create SEF(Search engine friendly) website. We will discuss what core system of joomla supports for sef and what third party plugins we need to extra enhancements.

What joomla core supports
In the Global Configuration, you can see the following options for the SEO settings.

• Search Engine Friendly URLs
  If set to “Yes” your url will look as below

• Use Apache mod_rewrite
  Apache mod_rewrite will be used to translate your urls into sef urls.

• Add suffix to URLs
  Lets you add .html suffix at the end of the url on joomla articles.

joomla sef

With the configuration as shown above in the example , the url of the an article in joomla will be like below.

See above url, the article id is prefixed on the url. Joomla core doesn’t supports to generate clean url without article id prefixed.
You need third party plugins for clean urls (more search engine friendly).

There are lots of free SEO plugins that helps you optimize your site.

• HPRouter

HPRouter is a free open source plugin to create clean joomla urls.

It is easy to install. Jus installing the plugin and enabling it is enough.

Url sample after enabling HPRouter.