Sometimes, you might want to create a Joomla page that is not available through a menu. You only want the page to appear when the URL is entered. This might be a 'thank you' page after form submission, a log in page or some other type of 'hidden' page you would need on your Joomla site.

Many users ask about this in the Joomla forums and on Twitter. I decided to write a short tutorial on how to set up a link to an element - article or other type of Joomla assett - with no menu item visible on the site.

Remember to always use the hyphen character (-) in your aliases. That way, you'll get more value from your URL keywords. Google treats hyphen (-) like a space, while it treats underscore as a non-breaking space.

There are basically three ways of approaching search engine friendly (SEF) URLs in Joomla. Here, I explain these three methods of Joomla SEO and their pros and cons.

Search engine friendly URLs are very important if you want to achieve good positions in Google and other search engines. Firstly, the URLs are a lot easier to understand for the user (more likely to be clicked). Secondly, and most importantly, they will (if well-built) contain keywords that the search engine may use in the indexation of the page and thus improve your rankings for those words.

The addition of Search Friendly (SEF) URLs will add greatly to your site in terms of search engine visibility.

In this tutorial, I show you how to set up one of the most popular SEF extensions for Joomla - sh404SEF.

My favorite SEF extension for Joomla is sh404SEF. I have tried a few other extensions as well, but sh404SEF is the one I'm comfortable with and which best seems to meet my requirements. This tutorial will help you duplicate the setup I use here at Joomlablogger.net.