Have you ever paid attention to what a Joomla standard link looks like? They’re very long, complicated and not very user friendly. To make things worse: They’re not very search engine-friendly either. And we ALL know that Google is a websites’ best friend.
Luckily for us, Joomla offers the option to easily user SEO URL’s (which stands for Search Engine Optimization or “Google Will Love You”). Here’s the breakdown on how to do it.
How to do it
1. Log in to the administrator panel of your website.
2. Under “Site > Global Configuration”, find the “SEO Settings”.
- For Linux-based hosting: Select the first two options, but mate sure that the mod_rewrite module is on. If you’re not sure, contact the technical person at your hosting company.
- For Windows-based hosting: Set only the first option to “Yes”.
3. If you’re using Linux-based hosting, find the file “htaccess.txt” in the root directory of your website. Rename it to .htaccess Don’t worry if it seems to magically dissapear. Your file is now “invisible” but will be interpreted correctly by the browser of your visitors.
I did all that and it still doesn’t work!
You obviously did it wrong, then. Just kidding, there’s one more option you can set.
4. Open your configuration.php file (after downloading it first) and find var $live_site= ‘’. Change this to match my example: var $live_site= “http://domainofyoursite/path/to/joomla’.
Enjoy your Google-Friendly URL’s!
miranda
June 6, 2011 at 11:45 pm
Thanks a mill for this! Saved me hours of time!
Steven Zeegers
June 7, 2011 at 7:40 am
Glad I could help