Is Joomla a good choice when it comes to SEO?

Greetings fellow BH'ers.

I want to get some input from anyone using Joomla effectively in achieving good listings in the SERP's using SEO for your keywords. I've always built my sites by hand using DreamWeaver but someone suggested that I take a look at Joomla. Claims it will help me get sites up a lot faster than by doing them by hand the way I've been doing them thus far, especially if I use templates.

I'm okay with that as long as I can exploit page interlinking with anchor text/title & alt tags, H1/H2, web page names as keywords, etc. I've also heard that Joomla is hacked pretty easily and that concerns me of course.

Any input would be DEEPLY appreciated, thanks a bunch!

Joomla can produce some gorgeous looking sites but it absolutely sucks at SEO, even with the various SEF plugins.

Setup a permalink in WordPress and everything - plugin, cache, translation etc. - will work with it. The same just isn't true with Joomla. For a start, there is no equivalent of the permalink - you have to use a plugin to get decent looking URL strings, and even those will only work with certain configurations. Tags, translations, archives - all of them break the SEO.

It's a complete dog's breakfast and the single biggest weakness of Joomla, which in (almost) every other respect I prefer to WordPress.

Edit: just saw the other part of your question - at present (and that's a big 'at present') the ONLY sites I've ever had hacked are Joomla installs, and I have as many standard HTML and WP sites as Joomla ones. The route in has always been the same - through the templates, which leave so many footprints they're a breeze to search for.