Compass Designs

I received an email a few days ago and thought I would briefly mention it here. Here is the initial email:

    Hi,

    I have recently been introduced to Joomla and I’m thinking of purchasing your Simplicity template for my future content site.

    I just have a question. I notice in your downloads section you have the ebooks by Ken Evoy of Site Build It. I’m sure you’re aware Ken has had great success at helping his customers (which I am one also with another site) get great free search engine ranking in the way you build a site using his methods/tools.

Good page rank is important to all of us and after reading the many forum posts on Joomla (some quite heated) re: SEO or SEF as they seem to refer to it. Joomla seems to be found lacking (plus those ugly urls Joomla creates).

    I have read your ebook on SEO and your comments on SEF both free and 3rd party. You seem to imply (after trial and error) not to bother with anything other than the built in version.

    I’m new to Joomla so, the question I have is, if the purpose of my site is to get good page rank and generate Google Adsense revenue as opposed to just getting a business site up. Do you think Site Build It is the better option? Each page has targeted keywords with SBI not so much with Joomla.

    Less functionality than Joomla but the SBI sites seem to have greater page rank success than the majority of Joomla sites I’ve visited.

    I already have a lot of content ready, I am just now making the choice as to which platform I should invest my time in and I would appreciate your viewpoint as I can tell you have a lot of knowledge in this area…

    Kind Regards,
    -Adam

    P.S Thank you for the great knowledge you have shared already, I’ve learnt a lot from what you have already provided about Joomla.

A great question from Adam, he is asking in a nutshell, what’s the best way to “beat the system”. The short answer is you can’t. Here was my reply:

   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

I have mentioned several times in various articles and postings, content is king. There are many posts at forum.joomla.org about people trying to get a 3rd party SEF to work. Their time would be much better spent generating unique quality content.