Does a CMS inhibit a site's crawlability?

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I smell baloney but I could use a little backup from the community!

My client was recently told by an SEO that search engines have a hard time getting to their site because using a CMS (like WordPress) doesn't allow "direct access to the html".

Here is what they emailed my client:

"Word Press (like your site is built with) and other similar “do it yourself” web builder programs and websites are not good for search engine optimization since they do not allow direct access to the HTML. Direct HTML access is needed to input important items to enhance your websites search engine visibility, performance and creditability in order to gain higher search engine rankings."

Bots are blind to CMSs and html is html, correct?  What do you think about the information given by the other SEO?

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Thank you, Keri! Everyone here is so helpful! This was my first Q&A and it certainly won't be my last.

[KeriMorgret]

I received an unsolicited email that told me things that were wrong on the SEO of my site, from a supposed SEO. They included:

7)      Website is devoid of Meta keywords which are required for Page 1 rankings. We will add Meta keywords for your website.

Good for you to get a second opinion!

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p.s. That video is gold! I sent it with my email response to the client for a third-party endorsement.

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Thanks for you help! Funny enough, it turns out this SEO himself uses WordPress for his own blog, so it must not be that scary.

Anyway, I found this SEO's comments very misleading. To me, this was a reminder of the corny but true sentiment that with great power comes great responsibility. It is easy for SEOs to scare the bejeebus out of people who know very little about the web.

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Thank you very much! I appreciate the support! This is a great answer and very balanced.

I think you are right that he sounds like a developer. If I give him a very generous read of what he is saying, perhaps he means that CMS get in the way of having full control over the code. As you point, out there are smart, easy ways around that.

Thank you very much! Very helpful!

[RyanKent]

WordPress is considered a solid platform for producing websites. Here is a link to a (long) video from Matt Cutts where he is a presenter at WordCamp. He praises WordPress for SEO and he uses the software himself on his site http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/. Just watch the first 4 minutes of the video and you will have an idea of his position on the software.

To offer a balanced viewpoint, your SEO sounds more like a web developer. There are some developers who don't use a CMS and prefer to code sites from the ground up. There are plenty of advantages to doing such. You have 100% control over every page of your site, you don't have any unnecessary code and you never are restricted from making changes.

The problem is time and cost. I have one client who spent $45k on a custom site which was poorly developed. We replaced the old website with a Joomla site (another popular CMS) for a cost of around $5k. The new site outperforms the old site in every category. The skill and experience of your developer is a huge factor.

[Klarke]

Yes you are correct.

Tell your client to run far.  That SEO has no clue, and is completely wrong.  Maybe he's thinking that out of box Wordpress doesn't have Title or Meta Tag management ?  That's solvable with Wordpress SEO. [highly recommended]

Wordpress outputs HTML.