My developer is building my site with a CMS template service called Mambo. I was not expecting a template website. Will this hurt my ability to develop the best site possible for SEO. I am paying a fair amount of money, should I expect a site from scratch.
Actualy Mambo .... Joomla is used widely for SEO purposes . You get nice URL rewrite and SEO extenstions to use and the template can be edited easily .
Joomla and mambo aren't great for SEO. You will need to setup a mod_rewrite for your URLs to be a little more search engine friendly. Even then though, Joomla and Mambo source code have repeated BODY tags and META "this page was generated by Joomla" info. Not ideal for SEO. If you are paying a lot of money for the site, I would be expecting a tailor-fit solution rather than an open source one. But, see how it goes, he may optimise the whole thing for you? Joomla can be good though for a lower budget, and a test site I setup a while ago did still get into search results with unoptimised URLs. Personally though, it wasn;t good enough for me, so I wrote my own CMS with SEO in mind from the beginning.