Today I spoke with a friend about search engine friendly URLs and how they are important for SEO in regards to your site indexing and ranking well in the search engines.  Many content management systems and other hosting platforms don’t offer SEF URLs as a standard feature of the system.  It’s very worth your time to find a plug-in or module you can install to help you accomplish this task.  Some will allow you to automate the process of naming your pages and other require a bit more work, but either way it’s one of the first things you’ll want to do to your site if it’s not already set up.   This is the case with many popular content management systems such as Joomla.

Why are SEF URLs important?

Search engines prefer static URLs as compared to dynamic URL’s.  Static URLs are simply easier for engines to crawl and a static URL is completely read by the engine.  A dynamic URL would often appear like something like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?pageid&=123456w&1212121212%search

or

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?pageid&=123456w&3434343434%search

You get the idea.  When an engine reads that domain they are going to stop at the ? on every page on your site meaning they are reading every page as http://www.yoursite.com/index.php.  That is not a good thing because these URLs appears as duplicate URLs to the engines.  You want the engines to read your URLs as separate pages that are unique.  Engines much rather prefer a static domains structure such as the examples below:

http://www.yoursite.com/about-us.php

or

http://www.yoursite.com/seo-tools-and-resources.php

I hope this helps you better grasp the concept and importance of SEF URLs.