At Alternative Marketing Connections, we use a variety of platforms to develop interactive and search engine friendly websites.  We tend to prefer Joomla, however, because it is better than platforms like Wordpress for creating multiple sections of regularly updated content.  

For example, a typical website we build has separate sections for news, blogs and testimonials.  Wordpress is a great platform for smaller sites or sites with a single blog, but Joomla is much more flexible for larger sites of this nature.

However, Joomla does not come with all of the tools you need to create a search engine-friendly website.  While it does have the ability to create search engine-friendly URLs (i.e., addresses with human language keywords), it does not include some of the other key components Google and other search engines are looking for.  There are a number of free and low-cost plugins available for Joomla to solve this problem and make Joomla websites much more attractive to the search engines.

Here is a list of some of our favorites:

The biggest story "buzzing" around the internet (pun intended) this week has been the effects, both positive and negative, of Google's latest "Panda" update to their search indexing algorithms.  Google's primary intent was to deemphasize the importance of "low quality" and "shallow" content created by content farms.

While some websites are seeing benefits from this update, others -- even some with decent quality content -- are seeing a drop in their Google rankings.

However, regardless of your knowledge level of search engine optimization (SEO), internet saavy, or even your personal views of Google, I believe you should take a "bigger picture" approach to search engine rankings.

As a web developer primarily working with small businesses on tight budgets, I always teach my clients the same principles: