In an article we published yesterday, Randy Woods and Julie Batten offer an essential primer on configuring your CMS to generate pages that are more SEO-friendly. Their list is particularly useful for eliminating technical bugaboos that could hurt your rankings. But can a CMS alone radically improve your rankings? I have my doubts. SEO experts (c.f., Johansson, Dash) increasingly point out that the real trick to better search engine visibility is good content, well written and edited, updated regularly, substantively rich, and ultimately worth linking to. When you are justifying a CMS investment, ask yourself: will new technology actually give us that? In some cases it might, if the CMS better enables your best minds to contribute more regularly to your public web publishing effort. But then ask yourself: is the barrier to their effective contribution today really technical?