I came across Drupal a couple of years ago and have been working extensively with it since to a point of almost exclusively using it.

Drupal is an a awesome open source framework for developing websites of all kinds. Its often described as a CMS but its more than a CMS in my view, I think of it as a website framework. It allows you build a vast array of different types of websites from community sites to ecommerce to MFA to whatever. Lets be clear its not a tool for everyone and it takes time to learn and get good at, however once you get there its an amazing tool to have in your Strategic SEO toolset. I choose Drupal after reviewing almost every single cms listed at opensource cms.

My primary reason for choosing it at the time was the fact that I found it to be way ahead of all the others in its handling of taxonomies, something that I spend an inordinate amount of time working on. As my knowledge and experience in SEO grew I gained a whole new apprecation of Drupal. Every aspect of it can be easily and quickly tweaked and tuned to get you exactly what you want presented to Google Et al.

If your starting out in Drupal SEO I would suggest that you install http://drupal.org/project/seo_checklist which is a really useful start point. As you get more into it you will find that there is a vast array of contributed modules that you can use to get you that Ranking you want.

What makes drupal stand out as a strategic SEO tool is not just the myriad of SEO specific Modules but the assortment of other tools that help you to build solid sites that are incredibly effiicient to manage and maintain. If you doing large scale SEO and have to run a lot of sites for different purposes then your knowledge ends up being secondary to your ability to manage and control them all in an economically efficient manner without letting quality suffer. Drupal gives you back the time to focus on impementing your knowledge rather than running to stand still. Once you have put in the effort and learned it (part of learning it means you gotta get involved with the community) it allows you to run bigger and more complex campaigns without losing on quality.

There are many lists of useful Drupal SEO lists so I dont want to repeat these so I thought I would put together a list of modules that you will find usefull that are not strictly seo tools. These should help with running a high quality site and automating tasks that people heavily involved in SEO spend a lot of time doing.. I dont use all of them on any individual site but have used them all at some point in time.

Some of my favourites are: