Buildling a website for SEO: Flat HTML or use CMS?

[AzamMarketing]

Lets say you were building a website with dozens of quality articles purely to drive traffic from organic listings. Would it be better from an SEO perspective to set-up the site using HTML or would CMS be more effective?

Do CMS systems like Joomla create unnecessary code which makes them less appetising to search bots?

Or is the extra code outweighed by the advantages (easier to add content, can have RSS feeds, social networking bookmarks, pings etc.)?

Thanks.

[AussieWebmaster]

The dynamic CMS is fine... most like Joomla have a widget that makes the pages spider friendly

[Ryan L]

I'll go on the record as saying that from an ease of use standpoint a cms is the way to go.

My experience says, Drupal with clean urls is the way to go.

I haven't looked back since jumping in with drupal though.

[Jazajay]

My personal expereiance is go with the html version then build a back end CMS yourself. Not that hard if you know a sever side language at intermediate standard.

How mine is set up.
I have four pages custom built which in turn "builds" 12 category pages 37 sub category and 2400 product pages.

I then built a custom cms that lets me add items, send email, check my custom logs, update items, delete items etc...

I then have custom Log tracking that checks
-4/6 conversion rates, about to update to 6, and gives me a % in the CMS.
-Unquie visitors per day, per week, and per month.
-Last time each spider visited each product page.
-Last comment added so they can be checked and cleaned before they can go back out to the public.
-Reffering pages
-What links on what pages where clicked to get there
-Code's delevered 200,404 etc...
-JS enabled
-page hits
-bounce rates
and quite a few more all manged by my CMS.

However if you are looking at time issues it took me close to 2 years from not knowing any dynamic code to setting it all up.

Also I have set up 6 servers to cope and also from a security point of view. This is not a sutiable suggestion for shared hosting as bandwidth,and space would be used up with in a few days.

However I measure every angle to my site and it allows me to control how the pages do in the SERPS. Especailly last time the SE viewed or even if they did at all is invalubale data.

All it depends on the amount of time you are perpared to put in. I'm just starting to see my bussiness take off now but the costs upto now have been high and a LOT of late nights.

The plus side is that my main keywords are saturated but I'm starting to move up and attacking my 2 main rivals head on and starting to think about taking it from a family/friend bussiness to employing staff just to cope with the amount of data and orders.

There is no reason why you cant go this route yourself and build a custom CMS. That way you get good code, good SEO and a CMS aswell. I biult my basic one from one PHP book - 5 php applications you can use every day or something like that.

You also have to think that public CMS's can be expolited if they are not updated to the latest versions.

It all depends on your level of expertise and what you are happy implanting. But if you do chose a CMS chose them wisely. A freind of mine just set his up then asked what I thought, He wasn't 2 impressed when I told him out of 955 pages only 150 were indexed.