mod_rewrite, or URL Rewriting

p>mod_rewrite or URL Rewriting offers a lot of possibilities for SEO and Statistics. Basicly, URL Rewriting is a marketing dream come true! You can transform read.php?aid=5823&mode=search&full=1 into this: search_business_101_secrets_full.htm ! Now, this gives a added bonus to your SEO efforts, adds a lot into that, but that is not all, i found that perhaps even of greater value is that now i see in my statistics: business_101_secrets_full.htm 375 Views Instead of: read.php 3 485 393 Views Now you are able to see specific articles right from your AWStats/Webalyzer or any else web statistics analyzation system! By default the get values, aid=5823 etc. are not saved into logs, so these cannot be analyzed, but now you will seemingly have different page for all your articles! Think about the benefits of in terms of Marketing Enhancements! Now about the implementation then? Some systems, like Wordpress comes stock with mod_rewrite capabilities, some systems like 4images & phpBB2 has mods for this. The problem with 4images mod altho was that you needed yourself to change the linking style of 4images to this style, the mod was just to allow these kind of URLs, this might be a lot of work, but with some PHP knowledge not hard at all. in the case of 4images, you just search all the files for references to: categories.php details.php etc. and change them according to how you want to. URL Rewriting rules are defined in the .htaccess file, and uses Regular Expressions to form the URLs which are rewrited. It takes a little bit of learning, but isn't too hard. Now, go and enhance your website marketing!