If you are like me and favour Joomla as the CMS to use for your online projects (this site is powered by Joomla by the way) you may have noticed that Joomla does not have a very good search engine friendly URL system.

What is a Search Engine Friendly URL?

Basically the idea behind SEF URL's is that the shorter the URL - the better.  Google does not like elongated URLS, for example: 

http://www.zerotemplates.com/index.php/component/jdownloads/?task=viewcategory&catid=3

Google much prefers URLS like the following instead:

http://zerotemplates.com/index.php/web-links.html

Making your URL's search engine friendly is an important step you should make to help raise your sites Google page rank.
Also when creating your SEF Alias address's you should try to include your keywords you are focusing on where appropriate to help improve your keyword rankings.

Ok so if your new to Joomla you might be wondering what you need to do to fix this. Well basically there are 2 ways around this.

1. Enable Search Engine friendly URLS under Global Configuration. 
To do this simply click the "Site" menu and select "Global Configuration" in the admin section.  Under Global Configuration, browse to the "SEO Settings" and select Yes next to "Search Engine Friendly URLs".

What this does is it forces Joomla to use the Alias name for all your content rather then the component address.  However sometimes this does not always work on some of the content associated with various different modules you may have installed.   This is when you may need to turn to an SEO extension to help you make your URL's search engine friendly.

2. Install an SEF Extension.

Installing a SEF Extension to manage your URLs can be the answer to your problems. I like to use "sh404SEF" as its simple to use and compatible with a lot of the popular content extensions.  It also does not require you to edit your htaccess. file which can often be a pain for the inexperienced user.