Today more and more sites are utilizing a CMS.

Historically it has caused nightmares for the SEO.

Most CMS do not take SEO in to consideration, so when it comes time for SEO a ton of changes need to be, other solutions including static landing pages or mirror the site for the search engines.

At first we thought it was simply the ? mark, however many of our clients sites have awesome rankings inside of Google even with the ?.
We have been able to get Google to index sites with the ? mark.

A big part of SEO is naming the pages, unique titles and descriptions and naming the images and using the ALT tags.

All of these things can be taken into consideration when building a CMS.

Over the past year we have actually built our own CMS, the entire program was built around SEO. The first few versions were really only for our internal staff and to speed things up.

Soon after that we landed a large ecomerce site that was built using a CMS.
When we first optimized the site we were contracted to optimize 150 pages of the 500+ pages. The system made things really difficult, when the client would create a new page the optimization was not included in the new page.

Our client actually makes changes 3 or 4 times a day to the site.
Depending on what is in stock pages are taken offline and then put back online at a later date. But when new pages were created the optimization again was not included. WIth in 2 months there were only 15 pages with the optimization code left on the live site.

We took the CMS a step further, considering how often the client is changing the site, we intergrated his current CMS with our CMS, this gave the client control over adding the optimization code to new pages.

We went from having to twak 150 pages down to tweaking 20 templates.
Saved us a ton of time and in turn a huge savings for the client.

We built our CMS around the SEO, but sicne we are also a complete web development compnay, many of our clients don't go with the optimizaiton.
Instead of building two CMS we just built the one, however we are able to turn off the optimization part.

Our designers and programmers are a trained it what it takes to create a search engine freindly site. Every site we build is built with SEO in mind whether or not the client takes the SEO.

An added benifit to do things this way is 6 months down the road when they decide they need the optimization a good portion of the set up is already finished, thus creating yet another savings for the client.

The new version which we are thinking of selling on the open market will be ready in about a month. Once it is we will be releasing the case studies and the do's and don'ts.