I particularly like WordPress’s built-in SEO system utilizing Apache’s mod_rewrite capabilities (URL rewriting). I’ve evaluated various open source CMS products and noticed (based on my experience alone, working on very targeted, niche-centric sites) that search engines such as Google tend to favor content delivered WordPress over other platforms such as Joomla. To clarify, I am speaking of the CMS’s default, build-in SEO features. There are certainly many plug-ins – both free/open source and commercial – you can install for popular CMS products such as Joomla that are designed to enhance the default SEO functionality.

Previously, I stayed away from utilizing WordPress for many of my web sites due to the obvious blog-style architecture (I was looking for a bona-fide CMS appearance). However, there are a number of commercial WordPress templates available to you for low cost (and even some decent free templates) that are designed to leverage WordPress’s core CMS capabilities by delivering content such as articles in a more traditional CMS style. A popular commercial WordPress template developer is WooThemes – http://www.woothemes.com/ — you can purchase a subscription to access various templates or you can purchase templates on an individual basis as well. If your budget is limited, you will sacrifice some of the nice features made available with these commercial templates but if you ‘don’t need a Porche’ as they say, there are a number of very nice open-source templates available for download at the WordPress template depository – http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/.

I’ve heard a few professionals indicate using WordPress beyond a blogging platform, as a true CMS product can experience some growing pains if you wish to upgrade the core system, add more features via installation of 3rd party plug-ins, etc. Performance may not be optimum as well, per the system being designed for blogging. But the advantages may outweigh the disadvantages per WordPress’s solid SEO capabilities and ease of use.

Don Nicholas of the Mequoda Group (www.mequoda.com), recognized as a top SEO strategist and forerunner in emerging web marketing research reported at a Washington, DC Specialized Information Publishing Association (SIPA) conference in June 2007 that they like to utilize this platform specifically for its excellent SEO capabilities. So there is definitely additional some proof out there to validate the use of WordPress as a true CMS platform vs. merely for blogging.

Just a quick word of caution – while using a pre-designed WordPress template can save you time, etc., from Google’s perspective, they may see your new site utilizing one of these templates as a duplicate web site with alternative content. For this reason, many developers/web marketing professionals prefer to make a few adjustments to both the front-end appearance and even in the code – perhaps renaming CSS style classes, etc. to prevent this from happening.