I am a big fan of Wordpress and try to get my friends to switch.

The news is Sixapart makes a nice little guide on how to switch.

http://help.sixapart.com/tp/us/typepad_to_wordpress.html

That combined with a Wordpress redirection (I use Platinum SEO pack plugin) makes it a very easy process.

I also tell my friends to upgrade to Typepad premium before they switch because it is the only way you can do a redirect if you do not own your own domain name.

Over all I agree with the above Wordpress is the CMS of choice and moving to it from Typepad is very easy.

While the 15 character post limit is extremely annoying, limiting posts to 31 characters is actually a way to show a little respect to Google and the rest by not having long really spammy urls. Shorter URLs have been a help at various points on various search engines.

Typepad IP addresses are very clean (paying customers only) and get a special Google boost (we move lots of sites from Typepad to Wordpress keeping permalinks intact and if the weblog moves onto a dirty IP just watch the rankings tumble). We try to insist our clients move to clean IP blocks and dedicated IPs but some of them have made other arrangements and can’t be persuaded.

On the other hand, Wordpress lets you do exactly as you want. We’ve added a javascript to our client sites which cuts off their slugs at 31 characters forcing them to create reasonable URL slugs.

Wordpress lets you add a plugin or two which turn excerpts into descriptions which again we limit at 155 characters via javascript in compliance with Google guidelines.

Wordpress SEO requires a bit of work, but done right on a clean dedicated IP is the best in the world. SEO though is not the area I would say Typepad falls down (at least until version two where they turned image names into numbers and cut the extension off causing display issues in at least Safari).

Addressing Jan’s point about the editor in Wordpress – I don’t like the editor/TinyMCE either (although the latest one is better). But guess what in Wordpress we were able to write a better Wordpress WYSIWYG editor (subjective of course) and include all the image SEO and management routines we wanted and which doesn’t break javascript. Try installing your own editor in Typepad or getting anything except numbered images in your posts.

I agree with your point that WP is one of the best, however, if one fails to arrange your robots file the proper way, he might hit himself in the head with the duplicate content problem.

Since version 2.3 (Sept 2007), WordPress has found an article if only a partial URL is provided. At first you may think this isn’t very interesting, but consider how many emails you have received where the line breaks in the middle of a URL.