Sometimes you want to create more than one link to a given item in your Joomla site. Let's say you have an article that you want to show up as subnavigation under Item A and Item B on your menu.

You could create two identical articles, linking one to Item A and the other to Item B. We used to do that in the static HTML days. Unfortunately, that generally meant that you had a maintenance nightmare, since when the page's content changed, you had to change it in two places.

With Joomla, you could create two links, one from Item A and the other from Item B, to the same piece of content. This works, but now you have two different URLs for the same page. That can lose you points in search engines.

The Joomla Alias comes to the rescue. Aliases appear all over Joomla, mostly an alias field for some type of title (article, section, category, menu, etc). However, this particular alias is a type of menu link. To do this:

1. Create the original menu link to the piece of content as you normally would.

2. When you're ready to create the alias, click the New button in the Menu Manager for the menu of your choice. The next screen shows a list of options (like link to article, category blog, wrapper, login, etc). The very last item on this screen is the alias option. Choose that.

3. Enter a title for the link (i.e. the clickable text that appears on screen). Choose the page to which you wish to direct this link from the drop down on the right. Note that the alias field here is used in SEF URLs (search engine friendly URLs) if they are enabled.

4. Save. Now when you click your new link, you are "redirected" to the original location of this page. There's just one link for the page itself, one set of modules to manage.