Main Menu

SEO Friendly URL's in Drupal - brought to you by sdesign1 - Drupal specialists

This article is based on Drupal - the free open source content management system.

When you first install Drupal, when you create a page, the url will look something similar to:

http://youriste.com/node/258

However, you can set up Drupal give you "Clean" url's such as http://yoursite.com/about-us

Initial Setup

Before you actually enable the module, you must ensure that your server it setup to handle these "Clean URL's".

Go to your Admin page, and click "Clean URL's"

Enable this if possible.

If you cannot Enable this (usually the text is greyed out) - then you need to make an adjustment to your sites .htaccess file.

Open your .htaccess file from the root of your site. Find the line "# RewriteEngine on" and remove the "#". Save and upload to your server.

Now go to back Admin > Clean URL's and you should be able to enable Clean URL's.

If you still can't enable this, ensure your .htaccess was successfully uploaded. If it was, you may need to install mod_rewrite on your server. Your hosting company will do this for you, if you own the server, then you can find instructions on How to install mod_rewrite.

Path Module

Before you can actually use these SEO-friendly url's, you must enable the "Path module" by going to Administer > Modules > Path and enabling the module

Now when you edit a page you should see "URL path settings"  on your page.

In the input box, you can put your friendly url, which will be similar to "about-us" - never start this url will a forward slash.

PathAuto

If you wish for this to be an automated process then you can download the PathAuto module. This is particularly useful if you are handing the site over to clients, to save them having to use a specific URL alias - the process will be automated - and is highly configurable.

Download the module at Path Auto.

If you have several content types such as "News", "Events" and "Profiles" then go to /admin/build/path/pathauto once you have enabled the module. And you can set automated URL's aliases for these content types. The settings are found under "Node Path Settings" . For example:

• News would be "news/[title-raw]"
• Events would be "events/[title-raw]"

And so on.

• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use
• A5 Leaflets
• Login

© 2006-2009 - sdesign1 Ltd