Search Friendly URL

Search Engine Friendly URLs (SEF) are an important on-page ranking factor when optimizing a Joomla! website, due to the simple fact that keywords are present in the actual URL. When crawling a website, the page URL is the first thing that search engines spiders are reading. A complex link with parameters (dynamic URL) as Joomla! default links, is hard to read by crawlers.

A dynamic URL is the result of specific queries made to the website database.For example:
http://localhost/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&id=3&Itemid=41

A SEF URL does not contain query parameters like "?", "&" or "=" :
http://localhost/joomla/index.php/faq

Default URLs from Joomla! (dynamic URLs) vs SEF URLs:

• search engines spiders aren't handling very well parameters present in the dynamic URLs and might not crawl them as well as the SEF URL.
• when a dynamic URL is displayed in SERP (search engine results page), emails, etc near a SEF URL, the SEF URL will have a clickthrough rate higher than a dynamic URL .This is explained by several factors: a SEF URL may reveal the content of a page before is actually clicked because is easy to read and remember by users than a dynamic one.

How to activate your Joomla SEF option:

To enable search engine friendly URLs in Joomla! you will have to activate SEF from the Joomla administrator panel. Just head to Site -> Global Configuration -> SEO Settings and set "Search Engine Friendly URLs" option to Yes.

The page URL is search engine friendly:

The SEF settings are activated, so the grade that RSSeo! gives to each page will be higher and the page will have more chances to be displayed in the Main Index of search engines and a better clickthrough rate than a dynamic URL.