Joomla 1.5 and SEF URLs for SEO on Godaddy

Search engine friendly URLs are a must for the search engine optimization.

Here is an example:

A search engine friendly URL: http://dacian.word-history.com/buy-the-dictionary.html

The same URL in a non-friendly way: http://dacian.word-history.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=30

Joomla 1.5 comes out of the box with this functionality. There are a couple of tricks to make it work on Godaddy.

In essence the steps are easy:

1. On the admin side, go to Global Configuration->Site->SEO Settings

2. Set search engine friendly and use mod_rewrite to yes; also set add suffix to urls to yes.

3. Rename htaccess.txt .htaccess

It should work but nmore often then not it doesn’t. Here is why:

1. Godaddy takes about 1 hour to take into account the .htaccess file once is set up on your site

2. The htaccess.txt in the distribution doesn’t work.

To make everything work, just copy the attached file as your .htaccess.txt and wait for about 1 hour for the file to be activated.

Good luck  !

PS: this will give you SEF URLs only for the basic Joomla functionality and as menus and articles. It will NOT provide SEF URLs for the components you are adding. This will be covered in the next article.