I was told by a friend webmaster that I can make my website more search engine friendly. How Do I do that?

He told me that I could improve my urls.

For Example:

Change From:
QUOTE:
http://www.example.com/?page=65&title=homes

Change To:
QUOTE:
http://www.example.com/homes-65.html


He also told me that I needed to have Apache's mod_rewrite enabled. What is mod_rewrite?