The Joomla CMS provides a neat little way to turn the standard ugly urls from their long, unfriendly format to a much more human readable 'Search Engine Friendly (SEF)" version.

Follow these two simple steps in order to make your Joomla system show friendly URLs!

Change this:

http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=44&Itemid=918

to the much more readable and search engine friendly:

http://www.example.com/blog 

There are just two things you need to do to achieve this. In the Joomla administrator area, navigate to System > Global Configuration. On this screen the first tab is Site. On the right hand column, under the title SEO Settings set Search Engine Friendly URLs to Yes. A new field will appear 'Use URL Rewriting' which you can set to Yes also.