Question

i want that in my blogs that i develop in PHP, the URL should look something like http://mysite.com/jan2006/best-day-of-my-life
instead of something like this http://mysite.com/viewblog.php?id=25
where “best day of my life” is the title of my blog post
what tool do i use to do this automatically ?
and does this technique help search engine optimization ?

Answer 1

You need to use .htaccess and Apache’s mod_rewrite. There is a mass of information out there on google & SO:

http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml

http://www.besthostratings.com/articles/htaccess.html

http://www.bloghash.com/2006/11/beginners-guide-to-htaccess-file-with-examples/

One thing to note, however, is that given the example you state you will still need a unique identifier to your specific blog post in your URL (namely the ID), e.g:

something like http://mysite.com/jan2006/best-day-of-my-life instead
of something like this http://mysite.com/viewblog.php?id=25

It would actually need to be:

http://mysite.com/25/jan2006/best-day-of-my-life

or http://mysite.com/post/25/jan2006/best-day-of-my-life

If you have an Apache hosting setup, in your root you would need a file named ‘.htaccess’. Its contents would look like (for example):

# set up mod rewrite
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^post/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)$ viewblog.php?id=$1 [NC,L] # Handle requests for clean urls to blog posts

As for

does this technique help search engine otimization ?

Yes, yes it does:

http://www.seocentro.com/articles/apache/mod_rewrite-seo-purposes.html

http://techie-buzz.com/how-to/create-seo-friendly-urls-using-mod-rewrite-and-php-part-1.html

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/using-mod-rewrite-to-convert-dynamic-urls-to-seo-friendly-urls

http://webhostinggeeks.com/blog/2011/03/31/seo-friendly-links-with-mod_rewrite/