Imagine this, You have a dynamic site powered by PHP/MySQL, its doing ok, you have submitted your website URL to all the known search engines, but still your site doesn’t seem to get much traffic from the search engines…ever wondered why ?

Well firstly, search engines have billions of pages to search. Imagine your link to be something like www.yourdomain.com/index.php?page=aboutme, its tough for any search engine to comprehend any keywords from the link.
But how about www.yourdomain.com/page/about-me.html ? These links are static Links, SEO Friendly Links, “Pretty Links”.

So today we are going to learn how to convert your ugly links into pretty links.

Index

1. Step 1 : Enable mod_rewrite in httpd.conf
2. Step 2 : Create A Simple PHP file
3. Step 3 : .htaccess file
   Method 1 – For only a single Variable
   Method 2 – For 1 and more than 1 Variable(s)
4. Conclusion

Ugly URLs
http://www.visionmasterdesigns.com/demo/seo/test.php?page=page1
http://www.visionmasterdesigns.com/demo/seo/test.php?page=page1&var=foo

Pretty URLs
http://www.visionmasterdesigns.com/demo/seo/page1.html
http://www.visionmasterdesigns.com/demo/seo/page1/foo.html

Click Here to download the script files.

Step 1 : Enable mod_rewrite in httpd.conf

Normally webservers already have mod_rewrite enabled. If it is not enabled, then you can request your host to enable it.

If you are going to try this tutorial in your local machine. Do check whether mod_rewrite module has been enabled in Apache. Do the following.

1. Navigate to your apache folder and open httpd.conf
2. Search for

   #LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

3. Remove the commenting character i.e #, then save the file.
4. Restart the Server

About the .htaccess file

You must have seen or heard about .htaccess file somewhere.

Quote from wikipedia :
In the Apache web server, .htaccess (hypertext access) is the default name of directory-level configuration files. A .htaccess file is placed in a particular directory, and the directives in the .htaccess file apply to that directory, and all subdirectories thereof. It provides the ability to customize configuration for requests to the particular directory.

Normally the .htaccess file must be present in the directory where your script is stored.
For Example : If my script is
myserver.dev/prettyurl/test.php
then my .htaccess file will be saved in
C:\server\www\myserver.dev\public_html\prettyurl\.htaccess *

*This is applicable if you have followed –
Tutorial : Installing Apache, PHP 5, MySQL 5 & PhpMyAdmin 2.11 in Windows Vista/XP

Step 2 : Create A Simple PHP file

Lets create a simple PHP file. PHP allows us to retrieve values from the URL iself using $_GET function.

For Example :
http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/test.php?page=mypagename.
$_GET['page'] would give the value of page in the above url.

http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/test.php?page=mypagename&var=secondvar.
We can have retrieve quite a lot of data from the URLs by using multiple $_GET functions. In the above URL we can have $_GET['page'] and $_GET['var']

<?php

//test.php
//storing the retrieved val from URL into a variable
$p = $_GET['page'];
$q = $_GET['var'];

switch($p) {
    case 'page1':
    // if $p = page1 i.e url was something like test.php?page=page1
  		switch($q) {
		case 'boo':
		//if $p=boo then url is somehting like test.php?page=page1&amp;amp;var=boo
		echo "<h2>This is page1 And BOO</h2><br />";
		break;
		case 'foo':
		echo "<h2>This is page1 And FOO</h2><br />";
		break;
		default:
		// if $p = page1 i.e url was something like test.php?page=page1
		echo "<h2>This is page1</h2>";
		break;
		}
    break;
    case 'page2':
    // if $p = page2 i.e url was something like test.php?page=page2
    echo "<h2>This is page2</h2>";
    break;
    case 'page3':
    // if $p = page3 i.e url was something like test.php?page=page3
    echo "<h2>This is page3</h2>";
    break;
    case 'page4':
    // if $p = page4 i.e url was something like test.php?page=page4
    echo "<h2>This is page4</h2>";
    break;
    default:
    // if page != any of the above, then default is executed
    echo "<h2>This is the Default Page</h2>";
	break;
}
?>

Save the file as test.php.

Test out the script, if we access
http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/test.php?page=page1
the result will be ‘This is page1′.
Similarly http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/test.php?page=page2
will show the output ‘This is page2′ and so on.

If we access
http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/test.php?page=page1&var=foo
the output will be ‘This is page1 And foo’

This sample code in PHP is to just show you how a general linking system works. It shows how $_GET works and how we can add data in the URL’s using ‘&’ operator.

Step 3 : .htaccess file

There are different methods to create “Pretty URLS”. I`ll just discuss the most common and the most optimized ones.

Ok ! Firstly our local server won`t have a .htaccess file, so we will have to create one. Fire up notepad, then type the following code.
Save the file as .htaccess. Place it in the directory where you have saved your test.php script.

Method 1 – For only a single Variable

Consider our dynamic URL to be
http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/test.php?page=page2
and we want our pretty url to look something like
http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/page2.html

#.htaccess code
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ test.php?page=$1 [L]

Let me explain what every line does.

• RewriteEngine On
  This tells to start the Rewrite Engine.
• RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ test.php?page=$1 [L]
  The basic syntax of
  RewriteRule pattern target_url [flag,flag,flag,…]
  1. pattern is ^(.*)\.html$
     () – Parentheses allow you to group several characters as a unit and also to capture the results of a match for later use. The ability to treat several characters as a unit is extremely useful in pattern matching.

     (.*) – Matches anything.
     Eg: http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/page1.html where (.*)\.html matches page1.html

  2. target_url is test.php?page=$1
     $1 is a variable where $1 = (.*) from the pattern.
  3. flag is [L].
     There are various flags. [L] means, If there is a match with a particular rewrite rule, It has to be the last rewrite rule to be executed.

Now lets test run our script. If the dynamic link is like
http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/test.php?page=page1
then your pretty link will be
http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/page1.html
Similarly for page=page2 the link will be page2.html ,page=page3 the link will be page3.html.

Phew ! That took a lot of time. If you are able to see the same output for both the ugly links and the pretty links, then you Rewrite rules are working perfectly.

Method 2 – For 1 and more than 1 Variable(s)

Now what if your dynamic URL was like
http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/test.php?page=page1&var=foo.
For the above dynamic URL we want our static URL to look something like
http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/page1/foo.html.
We want the first variable to act as a directory, while the second one should be the file name.

Note that previously page=page1 had become ‘page1.html’ since there was just one variable. But now we have 2 variables (page=page1&var=foo) so we the structure should be like ‘page1/foo.html’

We have to write a new RewriteRule to support 2 variables.
Remember : As your variables increase, the new Rewrite rules come before the previous ones.

We are basically extending Method 1 by adding another RewriteRule to support 2 variables as input.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ([^/]+)/(.*)\.html$ test.php?page=$1&var=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ test.php?page=$1 [L]

Let me Explain what the new line does.
RewriteRule ([^/]+)/(.*)\.html$ test.php?page=$1&var=$2 [L]

1. pattern is ([^/]+)/(.*)\.html$
   ([^/]+) – Which has the effect of matching any characters up to a slash or the end of the string, whichever comes first.
   (.*) – Matches anything

   ([^/]+)/(.*)\.html$ – characters up to slash ‘/’ any characters ‘.html’
   Eg: page1/foo.html where ([^/]+) matches page1 and (.*)\.html matches foo.html

2. target_url is test.php?page=$1&var=$2
   Every variable i.e $1 and $2 matches with the unit inside the paranthesis.
   $1 = ([^/]+)
   $2 = (.*)
3. flag is [L].
   There are various flags. [L] means, If there is a match with a particular rewrite rule, It has to be the last rewrite rule to be executed.

You can test it out
For all dynamic links like
http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/test.php?page=page1&var=foo
will have static URL’s like
http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/page1/foo.html

Conclusion

(Method 1   Method 2)
Thus for all dynamic links like

http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/test.php?page=pagex

will have static URL’s like

http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/pagex.html

(Method 2)
For all dynamic links like

http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/test.php?page=pagex&var=foo

will have static URL’s like

http://myserver.dev/prettyurl/pagex/foo.html

This was quite a basic tutorial. It is tough to understand the string matching patterns initially. But the logic is very simple. I hope the tutorial wasn’t tough to understand. If you guys have any doubts, feel free to comment here, I`ll try to solve them. Cya

Click Here to download the files.