The reason we push WordPress as the CMS for the rest of us is the Google love it gets.

If you want to read all about WordPress vs. TypePad, this article and its comments are worth your time-

I’ve just saved the really good parts here:

A Fool’s Wisdom » TypePad SEO Blows…
WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (once you enable permalinks) share the same great SEO, and WordPress is generally recognized as having the best SEO of any web publishing platform out there. We are very fortunate for having numerous SEO experts that have long participated in WordPress development including SEO luminaries like Google’s Matt Cutts.

…On the other hand, not only does WordPress not have either of these problems, if you change the URL after publishing, the old URL will continue to work and forward to the new URL.

I’ve done a few exports from TypePad, one of the most recent being Health.com’s blog. One of the things I did was review the existing search engine optimization and I’ve been repeatedly surprised to find scrapper sites some times show up above the blog in search results. My guess is these two issues at least play a part in this happening.

From the comments:

Well it’s quite easy to see who’s the best by exploring the Google search results. Majority of middleweight to top SEO experts are using either WordPress or a custom built blog soft. Anyone on Typepad? Almost none.

The reality is- if the first page of Google is the promised land, WordPress is the secret key to getting in.

Someone said on the hackers forum: “The analogy I use is that Categories are like a book’s table of contents, and Tags like its index.”

However, be aware that categories that are actual search terms are very strong Google magnets.

So, instead of using a category “lines we carry” think about “High Performance Motorcycles in Dayton OH”  and then use tags to highlight the brands and product names.

Tags are ways to identify the keywords or concepts in each post- categories group the posts in ways that make sense for others. Lately, Google has started dinging sites for putting a single post in more than three categories (which is too bad)- so think carefully about your choice of categories.