What is a search engine friendly URL?

All of our application records are stored in a database. When you wish to read an article, it sends a request to the database to get this record for you. This request is usually sent as a query string, and in its native form it looks something like:

http://yoursitename.com/kb/index.php?view=entry&entryID=90.

This works well to get the record back, but most search engines, Google excepted, will not index pages with question marks (?) or ampersands (&) in the name.

To get around this, we use a search engine friendly URL. This converts the query to something more like:

1. http://yoursitename.com/article /entry/90
2. http://yoursitename.com/article /Search-engine-friendly-URLs_90.html

which contains only characters that search engines recognize, and therefore will the record will be found by the search engine.

Not only that, when sending a link to someone else, it makes a lot more sense, and is a lot less error prone, to send a link http://yoursitename.com/kb/entry/90 than to sendhttp://yoursitename/kb/index.php?view=entry&entryID=90.

How do I set up a search engine friendly URL?

• Log onto your application as an administrator
• Choose the Global Settings menu on top
• Click on the Edit Global Settings => Find Email Configuration tab => Turn on / off SEO link.
• Go to the Titles / Meta section and choose an appropriate option from the Search Engine Friendly URL drop down list.

Note:

• For now "Search Engine Friendly URL" works only on Apache web server with mod_rewrite enabled.