Just Sangern's

How to use search engine friendly URLs feature of mambo and joomla? Read on for step by step instructions to turn on the SEF URLs in mambo or joomla.

To make URLs in mambo or joomla search engine friendly, do following:

Make sure your server has mod_rewrite enabled (so you need to have apache servers)
Server must allow .htaccess override
If you have both of these, then you can turn ON the search engine friendly URLs feature in mambo or joomla by going to admin > global configuration > SEO. You will need to rename the htaccess.txt provided with installation to .htaccess

If all goes well for you, your content URLs will look like http://www.site.com/content/view/5/2/ and component URLs will look like http://www.site.com/component/option…tact/Itemid,3/

These type of URLs are much friendly to search engines than the default mambo or joomla URLs.

However, these URLs doesn’t have any keywords in it so there still more to do. Best option is to use open source components from OpenSEF or 404 SEF to rewrite the URLs so that it has content title in the URL. With openSEF URL rewriting component installed, your urls will look much nicer like http://www.site.com/section_name/ category_name/content_title.html.

Search engines will love such URLs and you get full benefit of keywords in your content titles. Example of above techniques can be seen at www.photogrow.com which uses Open SEF component.