Pathauto: Generates Search Engine Friendly URL for Drupal

Pathauto is one of Drupal modules you have to use if you care so much about Search Engine Optimalization (SE0). Pathauto module will automatically generates path aliases for your Drupal site or also know as Search Engine Friendly url.

Pathauto can generate Drupal nodes, categories, terms, user, forum path aliases without requiring user to manually type the url path alias. You can even specify how Pathauto generates the path alias for your site. You can a path looks like www.yoursite.com/this-is-the-node-path.html or even like www.yoursite/category-name/term-name/this-is-the-node-path.html.

To use it first download the Pathauto module from here. Activate Drupal Clean URL feature from administer -> Site configuration -> Clean URLs, click on the "Run the clean URL test" link, if the test works enable the Clean URLs and click on the Save configuration button. Upload the modules to /sites/all/modules/ (assuming you're using Drupal 5 or above). Activate the modules from the administer -> Site building -> Modules menu. After that, configure how pathauto will operate in administer -> Site configuration -> Pathauto menu.

There are four type configuration that you need to do, which is General Settings, Node path settings, Category path settings, and User path settings. These are some explanation about all the options.

In the Node path settings, for an example you can set Default path pattern to [vocab]/[cat]/[title].html, this will make your node path alias look like /cars/mitshubishi/new-cars.html. You can modify the looks of your path alias anyway you wanted, just read on the syntax you could use. Don't forget to give a check mark on Bulk update node paths to allow this module to generate aliases for all existing nodes which do not already have aliases.