How to Create SEO Friendly URLs in PHPLD

If you have recently launched a PHPLD, you will want to update the URLs so they are SEO friendly.  Search engines such as Google and Bing, will index your pages more effectively if they contain a key word that is applicable to a specific topic.

If your running PHPLD 4.0, you can login to your administration panel and go to Settings and then Search Engine Optimization.  You will want to enable URL re-write as "Yes" and re-write output as "this-is-the-article-title-1."  This will update your pages to only list the description.

The next option is the output extension.  I like URLs to be shorter so I avoid using .htm, .html, and .php.  If you select No Extension (Just the title), your URLs will show http://www.yourdomain.com/category_description.

If your site is crawled and indexed before creating SEO friendly URLs (i.e. http://www.free-links-lawyers.com/index.php?c=3712), you will need to navigate to the category and update data within the category for the site URL to be permanently changed.  You can try to rebuild the cache, but I have found that you have to update the actual category record for the URL name to be updated.  If you have links built, these should update automatically.