Is Joomla decent out of the box for SEO or do you need to install mods to really get good rankings? There's a mod called sh404 or something like that, but looks complicated. Anyone have good experience with Joomla site rankings out of the box?
@Silve: If you use Joomla 1.5 with the SEO configuration and setting all on (Apache Mod_Rewrite active and Unix based hosting, which will be in about 80% of hosting companies) youd will do just fine on using good URLs. However the sh404SEF Component does a lot more than that, and it is not that hard to install and configure. Joomla standard has the ability to use Metatags like Description and Keywords, use them! Don't forget to empty out your Global Metags!
I think Joomla is ok, but every time i enabled Search Engine Friendly URLs the polls that i had on the site would break. I think i was using joomla v 1.5. Other than that everything seemed fine. *I am not a Joomla expert so it could have been something that i was doing wrong.
I have used joomla for years if you want seo you need to rename your .htaccess file and install SH404SEF. You also need to create custom titles and meta data for each entry otherwise they all look the same. It takes a while to learn but it's well worth it if you want to get serious about SEO