htaccss is used to manipulate URLS on Apache web servers.

As we all know, URLs are a tremendously important factor in SEO, and the easiest way to improve them is htaccess.

here is a simple example for htaccss file. The file we have is called /aboutthecompany.html but we want out viewer to see a clean path – /about/

Options All -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^about?$ ?aboutthecompany.html [L]

That was simple, here are some more tricky examples:

Zen-cart product pages urls usually look like

/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=7

how powerfull would it be if we could auomatically change them to look like

/gemstones/7/Aquamarine-Round-Blue

here is an htaccss file that will do exactly this:

Options All -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^gemstones/(.+)/(.+)/?$ index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=$1 [L]

isn’t that nice?

another nice example is changing the url of images

instead of /images/1212121212.jpg

we’ll see /gemstones-images/1212121212/Ligh-Blue-Aquamarine

Options All -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^gemstones-images/(.+)/(.+)?$ images/$1.jpg [L]

and this example shows how to redirect all the gemalaya.com traffic to www.gemalaya.com

Options All -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^gemstones/(.+)/(.+)/?$ index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^gemalaya\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.gemalaya.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Isn’t that cool?

all the examples above can be seen live on Gemalaya Loose gemstones