Most importantly search engines tend to rank content with a search engine friendly URL more highly due to the keywords that are contained in the URL. If you look at the URL of this very page you will see:

blog.joomlabear.com/setting-up-search-engine-friendly-urls-joomla-sef/

This URL tells Google, and other search engines, that the page is most likely about a number of things, such as; Search Engine Friendly URL’s, SEF and Joomla. This reinforces the other primary on-page factors Google looks at, the page title tag and content.

Another very nice side-effect of a SEF URL is that when somebody copies and pastes your link into a blog or forum they give you a link back with keywords in the URL. This is a big bonus, and something that will be explored again in a future blog post.

In this video I show you as quickly as possible how to setup basic SEF within Joomla (yeah I can’t help rambling about little details – It is a long video again, and I’ve got a slight cold, sorry!)

If you want to skip straight to the quick SEF URL checklist and resource list this is under the video.

Quick check list to get SEF URLS working in Joomla

1. Access htaccess.txt in your root directory and rename it to .htaccess
2. Visit your Joomla Global Configuration and in SEO settings set all options to ‘yes’ and save.

To access your root directory you can either use FTP or your web host’s file manager, as I have done in the video demonstration.

FTP access is something I consider essential for anyone serious about running a Joomla site, or any website for that matter – it still surprises me how many Joomla users I meet who have no idea what this is or how easy it is to setup. With FTP you can access your Joomla installation and manipulate files directly – you can upload and download files, rename, change permissions, etc.

If you want to access your site with FTP then here are a couple of quick tools I recommend:

1. Firefox – A free web browser – from our web stats I know that more than 50% of people visiting Joomlabear already have Firefox – this message is for the other 50% – Get Firefox here!
2. FireFTP is a free plugin for Firefox that lets you FTP into your website directory from within your web browser, as seen on TV in the video above. Get FireFTP here (Install Firefox first, then add this plugin).

To access your site with FTP you only need the following:

• your FTP address, usually ftp.your-domain-name.com
• A username, your hosting account login usually works
• A password, your hosting account password usually works.

If in doubt contact your web host for these details.

If you prefer the file manager option, Blue Host offer very affordable and reliable hosting and cPanel can save you a lot of time with many different admin tasks. You can also get a free Joomlabear template membership with any new Blue Host account – more details on this offer and Joomla hosting with Blue Host here.

Our Free Halloween Joomla Template is live and the official template page can be found at the previous link. There you will find links to download, source files, documentation of module positions, etc.

The demo site was designed around the idea of a simple Halloween costumes store. I didn’t really get time to flesh out the store with sample products so I hope you will just appreciate the overall aesthetic of the design and then put it to good use in your own projects.

Below is an image of my finished artwork in Adobe Fireworks – everything is on layers so elements can be switched out, edited, etc.

An example of how useful this can be is a quick hue/saturation filter I applied to the background layer, which gives us a really nice alternative effect:

The source files for this project are available to premium Joomlabear members in our downloads area.

I wanted to talk briefly about how I created the artwork and give credit where credit is due.

I’m very proud of the moon – this was created by cutting out an actual photo of a moon and then sitting it over the top of an orange gradient – I then changed the blend mode to Freeze to give a very orange Halloween look.

The font which I used for the logo, and which looks like dripping blood, or something right out of the Rocky Horror Picture Show is called Creepsville. It’s free for any use so you can grab this and make your own logos, etc.

The background was created using Photoshop, I took an image that  had a large amount of the night blue color in the template, and ran a Gaussian blur over it. I then used a number of excellent free photoshop cloud brushes from Qbrushes, and set them to black – overlaying these over my blue background.

The various Halloween icons, such as the Jack-O-Lantern, spider, cat, crow, bats and witch (you did spot the witch didn’t you?) were taken from an excellent Halloween Photoshop brush set from Obsidian Dawn. Love your work guys.

Hope you all enjoy the template! Leave a comment and let me know if you found this useful, and what projects you are using the template on.

In the example screenshot above the URL will result in:

www.example.com/test-article

or,

www.example.com/test-article.html

The result depends on how you configure your SEF URL  setup in Joomla’s Global Configuration, and whether or not you use a 3rd part SEF extension like sh404SEF.

The built in Joomla SEF is fine as slong as you are not incredibly fussy about URL structure. It will insert the numbering into the URL.

On the healthy recipe website demo linked to above I have set my Global Configuration for SEF so it looks like this:

To use the Apache mod_rewrite option you will need to be running on a linux based host and you will also need to FTP into your Joomla site  root directory, and rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess if you have not done this already.

A final tip is that this also applies to Section and Category URL’s – you can edit the Alias field for each to customize.