I keep reading reviews of Joomla that says it is not SEO friendly.  I will admit that the the default install does not put Joomla page URLs in a SEO friendly format but that it is a quickly solved.  

Before you change your site to be SEO friendly rename the file htaccess.txt to .htaccess  on your website.  This is a file that tells the web server how to manage certain settings of your website.  The new .htaccess file may need to be edited depending on the server's configuration.   If you open the file with the text editor in your hosting control panel you see it lists several possible changes that may need to be made. Most of the time no changes will need to be made but if your site generates an Error 500 Internal Server Error find the following line

Options +FollowSymLinks

and change it to 

#Options +FollowSymLinks

then save the file.

This should solve the problem.

Now on to making tthe site SEO friendly

Under Global Configuration in the Joomla Administrative  Panel there are three SEO Settings.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

Use Apache mod_rewrite

Add Suffix to URLs

Change all three settings to Yes and hit the Save or Apply button.

Now the URLs for your site will look like 

http://www.yoursitename.com/webpage.html

rather then 

http://www.yoursitename.com/index.php?option=com_weblinks&view=categories&Itemid=48

Now your website's URL's are search engine friendly.