Which is better for SEO, Php or Coldfusion?

I don't think it matters... You will see probably more .php sites in
Google searches than .cfm, but that is because one is free. When it
comes down to it, if the HTML-rendered content can't View Source
reasonably, your text-only search engine is going to optimize one
better than another.

Still, it comes down to content, metatags, and robots.txt. But SEO's know this. 

This is a free comment.

Both ColdFusion and PHP programs that genreate HTML output.  The web
browser makes a request to a .cfm or .php page, the server then
processes the page and sends the resulting HTML back to the client.

Because both deal in HTML, no server-side solution is "better" than
the other.  Rather, the key to SEO is to make sure the HTML generated
meets good SEO requirements.  There are many SEO companies that will
analyze your web site and give you suggestions for improving your
search engine rankings, for a price.  However, it comes down to
following a few basic principles:

* Descriptive and unique title for each page
* Use the meta tag for keywords and descriptions
* Keywords should be relevant to the content on the page and should not be repeated
* The description should be relevant to the page
* Make use of the H1, H2, etc HTML tags.  By using these tags, they
have more "emphasis" on the page, and therefore if you can repeat some
keywords as headings on your page you should see better results.
* Clear markup - using XHTML markup with CSS styling makes it "easier"
to find the content in a web page.  Robots have to parse the HTML
source, so try to make your HTML source as clean as possible.
* Use ALT tags in images for alternate content
* Don't use any tricks, like having a font the same color as the
background color, or using miniscule fonts with irrelvant keywords.  A
lot of search engines will NOT index a page if they suspect some sort
of trickery.
* For google especially, try to get your site linked from other
relevant sites.  In general, the more incoming links your site has,
the higher your page rank.

It's not the server technology used to create the HTML, it's how the
HTML that is created is formatted.

If you're looking to hire an SEO company to help, google has some
advice on that:  ://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html

Some general guidelines for making your pages more search-friendly can
be found here: http://www.searchengineguide.com/optimization.html

In regards to indexing dynamic pages (which directly relates to
ColdFusion and PHP), this isn't a problem like it used to be.  It used
to be that if a ? or & was present in the URL, the search engine would
not index it because the content was considered to be dynamic
(changing).

To overcome this, there are "search engine friendly" URLs that can be
created with dynamic technology.  If you have a Windows server you can
use a program like ISAPI_Rewrite (http://www.isapirewrite.com/) to
mask a dynamic url.  Apache can do this "out of the box" with rules, I
believe.

For example, the url http://my.site.com/go/page/12 is considered
"search engine safe" because there are no ? or & in the address.  When
you request that page in your browser, the request would get
intercepted by ISAPI_Rewrite.  It would then send a url like
http://my.site.com/processPage.cfm?page=12 to the web server, which in
turn would perform the server side processing of the dynamic page. 
However, to the user, there are no ? or & present, so it appears they
are going to a static (non-dynamic) page.  By using this sort of
technology, you can fake seach engines into indexing dynamic content
by giving the dynamic content a static alias.

In most cases PHP holds major advantages over cold fusion in terms of
search engine friendliness. Cold fusion mixed with far reaching
directory structures can actually be a death march in the spidered
engines. CFM sites that include just the slighest of structure issues
typically suffer huge swings on reindexes. CFM urls can become
burdensome upon conversion and 'heavy' the heavy urls tend to sink and
fall often. CFM requires the most management and maintainence if you
have yet to name/define urls make sure to review best practices.  This
company helped us with the rename URLs 
http://www.peakpositions.com/websiteOptimization.html and move away
from cfm. Our site is quite large and database driven
(http://www.starwoodhotels.com/sheraton/offers/index.html)it does very
well in the engines and the recommendation to parse and minimize
strings in key areas of the site has really helped us. Good luck and
be wary of cfm.

Try:

http://www.getpromoted.com

It is a great resource for webmasters. This forum is dedicated to
Search Engine Optimization only.

Hello habitdoc,

It really does not matter at all. Just remember not to use SESSION IDs
and keep your URL Parameters (values comming right after the ?) in a
few numbers.

Search Engines love to crawl content rich sites, but the best way to
be a rich content site is to be a dynamic site. It is very OK and
infact advisable, just remember my suggestion above.

Check this sites http://www.isnare.com and
http://www.ezinearticles.com, they both use PHP but still search
engines love them.

Also http://www.ideamarkerters.com they use CFM but still they rank as
much as the two other sites rank in the big 3 SEs.