trying to educate myself here. I know there is a way to rewrite a url so that if it contains the following

website.com/index.php?page=locations

it would just turn it into

website.com/locations

This would work for anything that has the pattern index.php?page= correct? Any help with what the flags etc are? I have tried the below among many other things and can not get it to work

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} index.php?page=
RewriteRule (.*) website.com/$1? [R=301]

This will work

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/([a-zA-Z0-9-]*)
RewriteRule ^(.*) /index.php?page=%1	[L]

so... www.yourdomain.com/anything-here
will show the content from index.php?page=anything-here

for more details check out this guide at Apache website
URL Rewriting Guide