We now go from one of the most basic tasks to one of the most important—setting up search engine friendly (SEF ) URLs. Let's start the discussion by setting a clear definition of what it means for a site to have search engine friendly URLs.
Sites created with content management systems such as Drupal, rely on interaction with the database for the display of content. Accordingly, the URLs often include query strings and other characters that are needed to extract that data from the database. (In contrast, a simple HTML site doesn't have this issue; as a result, its URLs are typically much simpler and lack the complexity seen in CMS-powered websites).
URLs containing query strings and other odd characters are hard for both humans and search engines to read. Ideal URLs are readable and tell us something about the content of the page. By default, the Drupal system produces complex URLs containing additional characters that serve no useful purpose for the...