This tutorial will show you how to enable Search Engine Friendly URLs on your Joomla site.
Tutorial Text
In this tutorial we will enable our Joomla site to work with Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs. In order for SEF URLs to work your web server needs to be apache and you need to have mod_rewrite enabled. If you have questions about either of these, talk to your webhost.
Navigate to Site >> Global Configuration
Then you will need to select the SEO tab.
Select the Yes radio box next to the Search Engine Friendly URLs option.
Joomla will alert you that you need to change the name of your file. When you initially upload Joomla, it is named htaccess.txt. For SEF to work, you will need to name it .htaccess.
Click the OK button
Click Save
We have now enabled everything in Joomla. Let's go rename the file and get it setup to work properly.
Open the htaccess.txt file.
If you have Joomla installed in a folder (www.site.com/joomla) you will need to edit the RewriteBase line. It should read RewriteBase /joomla