Hi everyone, Forgive me if this has been asked elsewhere on the forums - I couldn't find any posts on this. I have been asked to make a case for why not to use Coldfusion for SEO reasons. What are the reasons? Is it easy to make individual pages search engine friendly? How about the URLs, are they easily spiderable? Sorry if these sound like silly questions, I am completely new to CF and so this is why I ask. Many thanks in advance.
As far as search engine friendliness goes, ColdFusion is not different from any other language - if coded properly, the resulting pages could be SE friendly, or they could not be..that is entirely up to you. As far as 'why' to use ColdFusion, it is in use by 75 of the Fortune 100 companies. It is a language geared for rapid application development - applications can be written in CF in a fraction of the time it would take using .NET or PHP. ColdFusion has a slew of built in tools which enhance it's capabilities including XML processing, easy file uploading, Flash integration, ability to quickly and easily consume or create web services, PDF integration and publishing, charting tools, SMS and other gateway integration.
Do a google search for 'why to use coldfusion' - you will find numerous articles that should help you make the case. Most bosses respond best to this one: Rapid Application Development = major savings in development and maintenance costs. CF is also highly secure and easily scalable. Since it's acquisition by Adobe, product integration with other Adobe products has been a major priority for the product line - Flash, Photoshop, Fireworks, etc. Dreamweaver CS3 all have major built-in functionality with CF code, Spry, Flash, and AJAX.
In context, it looks like "hey, why not use CF?". By addressing the SEO and URL concerns, he'd be eliminating a typical objection to dynamic pages. Regarding SEO and CF, the format used for links on the Salary List pages shown in the footer of www.salarymap.com work extremely well for Google and others.