Why should you make your Magento Product Filter URL look sexy

Fist off - it is every URL´s right to look sexy and Magento supports readable URLs well.

But some areas are still a little bit abstract and not optimized for humans or the search engines.

Search engines like Google have very complex algorithms to rate a website. They already guess very good which content a user is searching for. Because they are rating the websites on how good they are optimized for human!

This is the reason why Magento´s default layered filter URLs are bad for humans and for SEO:

http://magento.local/men/shirts.html?color=27

Nobody knows that color=27 is blue - neither does Google (although we think Google knows everything)!
So if someone is searching for a Shirt in blue, your products won´t be in the index, because your Shirt is 27, and therefor not indexed as blue shirts ;). This may be the case for the product detail pages, where the product has it´s attributes, but here we talk about the category pages where the product collections are filtered.

To solve this problem we have created the SEO Filter URL module. It is easy to install and it works with almost no configuration.
At the end you will get URLs for your Magento  1.7, 1.8, 1.8.1, 1.9, 1.9.1, 1.9.2, 1.9.3 like:

 http://magento.local/men/shirts/filter/color/blue.html

 Also the price filter is translated. If you click filter "$140.00 and above", you will get:

http://magento1-9-3.local/men/shirts/filter/color/blue/price/from-140-and-above.html

in your browser´s address line.

For the developers among us:
It seamlessly integrates in the routing with an observer on the event controller_front_init_before. The links of the layered are change by overwriting the navigation model Mage_Catalog_Model_Layer_Filter_Item.
Also the page links of the catalog toolbar are change to get a readable "page" instead of "p=" for links in the pager.