CMS and SEO, how do they affect each other.

I am thinking of switching my website from a basic html format to a complete CMS format. I have heard that having a CMS on a site makes it harder to achieve high ranking on SEs than if it were just a basic html site. From what I heard, this is due to the intense scripting and coding which makes it harder for SEs to crawl your site and clouds the real content with tons of code. Also, from what I understand, crawlers do not consider keywords in any URL if they are preceded by a question mark.

I have also heard that it absolutely does not make a difference at all.

Can someone please share their ideas.

 

It totally depends on the CMS.

Drupal, for instance has a number of modules that makes your site's code (html) extremely SE friendly, such as SEF (search engine friendly) URLs, tagging, sitemap.xml creator, create a good hierarchy etc.

With anything you're going to need to spend time optimizing the site, but nothing takes longer then optimizing EVERY onsite SEO aspect for EACH page as you would have to when the site is just straight HTML (I know from my own experiences).

 

The most of CMS are SEO friendly and you shouldn't have any problems about this. Drupal is the most SEO friendly CMS and provide everything what you need out of the box.

With some additional modules such as XML Sitemap module, pathauto module etc you will forgot about optimizing your website pages at all as Drupal will do all for you. Yes it will take some time to optimize it at begin but in future all what you must to do is to write content.

Wordpress is also SEO friendly. But I wouldn't offer to use it as CMS. To much configuration must to be done. Especially if few people are going to organize content.

Joomla is not so seo friendly and you will do some extra work to optimize. But nothing is impossible.