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We have sites built in Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and also custom built CMS's. All of these are search engine friendly.  Wordpress in particular has a number of excellent SEO guidance tools to put you on the right track. The consensus of opinion from the comments given is that you need to question your web developer's opinions.  Making the wrong choices now will only land you in hot water in the future. Good luck with your project

I agree with this wholehearedly. OSE is without a doubt the best tool for analyzing a competitors linking strategy. Seeing the competitors strategy is great, but another reason I really like it is because I can know how good the person is that I'm up against. If they have links that I have no idea how they obtained them, then they know something I don't, and vice versa. Have you figured out a way to successfully use OSE or Linkscape to get an idea of how well somoene's onsite optimization is? I'm familiar with the "internal MR passed" but that's one of those metrics I don't trust as much as the others. Do you have any other strategies? Thanks!