Joomla SEO Best Practices

To take advantage of Joomla SEO, you need to enable the "Search Engine Friendly URLs", "Use Apache mod_rewrite" and "Add suffix to URLs" in the global configuration menu.

You will also need to rename the htaccess.txt to .htaccess.
note: with JoomlaHosing.uk.com and some other hosting providers, if you start receiving "error 500" messages it is more likely that you need to comment out the following in the renamed .htaccess file-
"#Options +FollowSymLinks" commenting out means to place a "#" infront of the command

It is important to mention that when designing your Joomla web site, it is best to use Joomla internal urls for all internal links to use Joomla SEO correctly.
These are the URLs that appear in the browser bar, BUT you need to read these URLs before enabling the Joomla SEO settings otherwise they will have been re-written from "index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=133&Itemid=164" to something like "http://joomlahosting.uk.com/joomla/hosting-plans.htm

If you can understand Joomla internal urls then this should not become an issue, take a look at the following:-

The URL "index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=133&Itemid=164" contains the internal article id "article&id=133" and a menu Item id " &Itemid=164".

If you just want to quick link to an article you could use the following "index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=121"

The Itemid is what Joomla uses to decide which modules and templates need to appear on the page, rather than go into too much detail here we will keep it simple
Menu link itemIDs are found in the menu manager located to the right

Remember it is best to create the internal URLs when you are creating your website and before enabling Joomla SEO settings to avoid re-write errors and to better read the internal URLs from the browser bar