Sakic.net's excellent SEF Advanced 2008 for Joomla 1.5x is a great way to get your Joomla site Search Engine Friendly.

Sakic's SEF Advance

We all know that Joomla is not the most SEF (Search Engine Friendly) software on the planet out of the box; but fret not, Sakic's SEF Advance to the rescue.

Sef Adv. (as it's commonly known) will turn those pesky unfriendly and quite frankly ugly links and turn them into keyword rich, nice looking and human readable URLs which will help your search engine ranking dramatically.

SEF Advance will automatically convert all URLs of your Joomla site to new, advanced URLs as you install it. It will also redirect all requests to old-style SEF and non-SEF URLs to corresponding advanced ones at the same time that it prevents Joomla from creating different URLs with duplicate content which could hurt your ranking in the search engines.

SEF Advance comes in two flavors - SEF Advance for Joomla 1.0x and SEF Advance 2008 which is 1.5x compatible.

Installation

Installation could not be quicker and easier; all you need to do is install the component via the admin installation function and upload a new updated .htaccess file into your root directory (The SEF ADV. 2008 version does not even require you to do that).

Setup and Configuration

SEF Advanced basically work out of the box without any configuration (other than turning it on), but there are several things you can tweak and adjust to your liking.

Preferences - Here is where you can configure things like; what to replace spaces in URLs to (- (dash) is the default and preferred option), long or short urls (short=by title, long=by name) and redirect non-www. to www.domain.com (recommended).

You also have the option to append creation date and id to make items more unique and Google news friendly and wether to redirect built-in or non-sef URLs to their corresponding Advanced URLs.

You can change the default pre-set strings for a bunch of standard content and component strings, like blogsection/category, weblinks, poll and contact and even create your own custom component strings if you don't like the one each component uses by default.

Replace special characters you may use, especially if you are writing a non-English blog, such as turn å into aa or ö into oo to make the URL universally accessible. The same screen also allow you to set your own custom 404 page.

Because of Joomlas dynamic nature, there may be some reason you may want to ignore the output of a special component, SEF Advance allows you to do just that by selecting the component to ignore. For the record, I have never had to use this option, everything has worked flawlessly out of the box.

However, sometimes you will have a component generate a URL that for one reason or another will not convert well by SEF Advance and there is a section in the admin backend that allow you to manually set the non-SEF URL into an alias (SEF url).

You can configure SEF Advance to log every 404 Not found URL and it will save the time, IP of visitor and the referring url.

Verdict

I have tried many free and commercial SEF components for Joomla and SEF Advance is by far the superior of them all in terms of installation, setup, ease of use and list of features. Other SEF extensions I have tried have been much messier with less support.

The install, configure and forget makes this a top notch extension for Joomla; the only other thing I would love for it to do would be to create XML Sitemaps but that's not what this product is about.

It is fairly expensive at EUR 40 per installation, but the value is very much worth it and if you have many Joomla installations you may want to invest in a server wide installation for EUR 400. This is also a great option for web hosting companies that want to offer their client an added service either paid or free.

There is a 30% discount for existing customers of SEF Advance that upgrade to SEF Advance 2008 for Joomla 1.5x.

There are special coded plugins for over 30 Joomla components that will further expand the ability of SEF Advance (for a full list go here ).

On top of being a great extension, the support by the creator is excellent as well. This is done via email or their forum. The extension has been around and updated continously for over 4 years, that shows stability and that Sakic.net plans to stick around.

We highly recommend this component to anyone running a web site based on Joomla 1.0x or 1.5x.

Purchase: SEF Advance