One of the first things I like to do after installing a new Joomla site is to activate search engine friendly (SEF) URLs.  SEF URLs are human readable addresses in your web browser for various web pages on a website.  Out of the box Joomla’s URLs have this basic format:

**Update, May 28, 2010 (see info below regarding Nodewords)

Drupal is a fantastic platform for developing scalable web sites.  I recently switched from developing most of my web sites in Joomla to Drupal.  As to the reasons why, I’ll save that for another blog post. Once I switched over to Drupal I was keenly interested in finding out the best way to optimize it for good SEO best practices.