I currently have a website that I am trying to optimize in terms of SEO.
I've got the site working with URLs such as:
domain.com/?app=about
In my app, $_GET[app] is set to 'about', as expected.
Now, I want to make it so that a URL like domain.com/about is treated as if it were domain.com/?app=about.
How can I do this in an Apache .htaccess file?
These are known as RewriteRules, and they are fairly straightforward:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^about$ /index.php?app=about
As far as making it more generic, how about this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z]+)$ /index.php?app=$1
This will make any request to something like /staff or /contact redirect to index.php?app=[staff|contact]
Use this in your .htaccess
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /your-site # only if neccessary
RewriteRule ^([^/])$ index.php?app=$1 [R,L]
EDIT
I added the L flag meaning process this as the last rule, and the R flag which by itself does not change the URL .. just rewrites internally. Doing R=301 will forward the browser to the rewritten page, which is useful for debugging.
Creating a general .htaccess getting the path requested can be done with the following line:
RewriteRule ^((.+/)+)$ /index.php?path=$1 [L,B]
This will give you the path requested escaped properly so if the requested path is /hello/world you will get hello%2Fworld in the path parameter. Use the PHP function urldecode() to get the original format.
Works only if the url ends with '/'.
NOTE If you have other rewrites in the same file you should place this one last as it will match basically anything.