Are CMS or Content Management Systems like Joomla, Drupal and Subdreamer search engine friendly? I mean if I were to switch my site from an old dynamic site that I have to change each page the old fashioned way to a cms, would it eventually rank high with the proper keywords, metatags and such? My current site will show in the top 10 on every search term that a user will look for and I do not want to loose that unless I know for certain that I can regain it.

It depends of the CMS you're going to use. If it's got a SEO-friendly urls option (withouth the ?somevar=thingy&othervar=this...), it's as good as search engine friendly as a static html site. Otherways, it's not.

I am using Joomla on one of my sites and it seems to be quite friendly.

I have set it so that it is search engine friendly and it was simple as A B C to do!

Thanks for the replies. I am looking at using Joomla as well and did see the friendly urls option, I am amazed at the ease of use of Joomla and am still looking at others to see which would be best for me. If ranking are a non-issue then I may switch an older site later.

Joomla has plenty of extensions which can do near enough anything.

You need to have a play around with it to figure out how it works and stuff but it gets easier

I am no expert but if you need any help let me know.

I am playing around with it now, can you tell me how to make the index page show like you would see a normal index? For example the site I am looking at using it for is a church website: www.biblebaptistbeckley.com if you go there you see the standard index page or home page, but with the Joomla installation within a folder I have called cms, you see that index page within the cms folder like this www.biblebaptistbeckley.com/cms/ or http://www.biblebaptistbeckley.com/c...page/Itemid,1/ instead of www.biblebaptistbeckley.com or www.biblebaptistbeckley.com/index.html. I see other sites that look like they have been created with a cms and they do not appear to have this problem, maybe I am just missing an option?

You might also consider looking at TYPO3 for SEO. I haven’t found anything better for manipulating keywords in URLs and for human readable URLs.

Unlike Joomla TYPO3 does have a steeper learning curve and complexity but with that some extra benefits, more flexibility, an n awesome templating engine and large selection of plugins.

You can also dumb down the administration interface to make it real easy for technically illiterate clients to use. This is the main reason I suffered so long making TYPO3 easier to understand and use.

There's a lot of TYPO3 bashing because of the learning curve, complex documentation, resources used and something called TypoScript, which for non-programmers like myself is actually a blessing in disguise.

TYPO3 isn't that bad once you locate good documentation, figure out the short cuts, which plugins are good and have a pre built setup to work with. The next version of TYPO3 5.0 plans to simplify the system and reduce its resource consumption.

http://5-0.dev.typo3.org

If you want something for a one-time thing then I would recommend Joomla or Drupal. Joomla will be the easiest to work with. I've been providing free TYPO3 support for a while so if you have any questions please feel free to shoot me an email or post them here.

Here's an interesting comparison between TYPO3 and Drupal. I haven't found one between Joomla and TYPO3 yet.

http://drupal.org/node/131855

wordpress is very friendly but it is for blogging although I kinda use it as a CMS

Also you can sometimes fin seo plugins for a lot of the popular CMS scripts

Thanks everyone, I am going to take a look at Typo3 and Wordpress.

joomla with the sef advance mod does an ok job as far as SEO goes.
I however am recommending Modx to everybody who's seeking an out-of-the-box SE friendly and ajax-enabled cms.

Interesting article mentioning Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and Typo3.

Search Engine Friendly vs Search Engine Optimized
[blog.design-cars.com]

Netricks Web Hosting uses a CMS with SEO friendly URLS. Check it out. It is really easy to use. More on the Netricks Content Management System.