I general use combination of mod_rewrite and database driven stuff...
I generally have meta tags coming from database and all the URLs are html ones..
you can check example on our company website here
http://tajonline.tolshop.com
all PHP urls are turned to html..
take this for example..
original URL
http://tajonline.tolshop.com/v1/indian/index.php?cat=|0|59|&name=giftcertificates
HTML URL (after mod_rewrite)
http://tajonline.tolshop.com/gifts-t...tificates.html
infact you can use CMS like
Textpattern also, you can create CSS based layout and content can be from database...
Search Engines should love it and it should improve your ranking...(not talking about
PR)
Regards,
Deep