SharePoint Publishing Site - how do I implement reader and search engine friendly URLs?

I have developed a publishing portal in MOSS 2007 environment. I have some pages whose urls look difficult for end users to read, and are also causing search engines to not index my pages properly.

I went through some articles for implementing the 'friendly url' in SharePoint. I stumbled upon some external tools like 'tinyurl.开发者_C百科com', but I don't want to use third party tools for accomplishing this.

I downloaded the 'URL Rewrite' extension for IIS from Microsoft as suggested by many. I tried setting it up, giving it the internal URL name and friendly URL name while creating a rule. The request is made to the friendly URL instead of the internal URL. I don't know where am going wrong.

Should I keep trying to make things work with this extension, or is there another feasible approach I can try?