A couple weeks ago, I linked to an article from Stuntdubl on 11 Reasons Advertising Agencies Hate Search Engine Marketers. Yesterday, he posted the Top 10 Ad Agency SEO Lies. Read the article, it is well worth the time. If you hear these from your agency, you need to find one that gets the web and gets SEO (this is where the shameless plug for using Red Rocket as your agency goes).

For those of you familiar with SEO (search engine optimization), these probably make sense. However, if you don't know what SEO is other than how to spell it, don't worry. I'm going to try to give you some more information on why these are bad and what you should hear from your agency.

1.You really need metatags
…if this was 1999. Now you need social bookmarking, press releases, content syndication, a blog and someone to run it, some viral content as linkbait, and about 500 more good sites linking to yours with your targeted anchor text, but we don’t actually DO any of that yet.

Meta tags are descriptions and keywords (meta information) about your web page that is embedded into the HTML to help search engines describe the page. Years ago, it was important to focus on these since it could mean a higher search engine ranking. Today, these have fallen out of favor. We typically recommend using a generic set of meta keywords and a nice, human-readable meta description for all pages. There are many more areas of optimization to spend your time on that will make a difference.

2. We shouldn’t have a problem ranking you for “home loans”.
Actually, we could probably buy your way in on PPC if you can afford $5 clicks. Even if you had 100k budget to spend just on ranking for that phrase you’re probably screwed, but you’ll be fine just ranking for “low rate home refinancing loans in detroit” instead right?

If it was easy to rank your site for a very competitive keyword phrase, everyone would be #1 right? Ranking for geographically limited keyword phrases (like "orlando home loans") is typically easier but that still depends on the area and phrase.

3. Links aren’t really that important.
Don’t worry, our crappy corporate-speak content should attract them naturally. If it doesn’t we’ll just continue to charge you until we get so fed up with each other that we’ll just outsource your project to someone else.

Having relevant web sites link to your site has always been important. Lately, there has been a huge focus on incoming links to build relevancy. This is a double-edged sword: bad links can cause bad rankings and spam links can get your site banned from search engines. Good SEOs will find quality, non-spam links to link to your site.

4. No, they’re not doorway pages, they’re “landing pages”
(It’s okay, BMW does it)

Doorway pages are pages that are optimized for a search engine, not a human (here's a better discussion of this). These have been bad for a long time now and that hasn't changed--no matter what they are called. And yes, BMW did it, and yes, they got caught and banned from Google until they cleaned up their act. If you aren't as big as BMW, don't count on you site getting a ban lifted that quickly.

5. Rankings in 30 days? No problem.
…for your obscure 7 word keyphrase it should only take a couple months after we get all the copy approved by the legal team.

Getting rankings takes time. A lot of time. 3-9 months or even longer depending on the keywords and competitiveness of the category. As noted, getting ranked for an obscure keyword phrase will happen quicker but that's probably not what you had in mind.

6. It’s easy to rank well (*cough* in dogpile), We’ll just submit your site to 150,000 search engines.
I learned about search engine marketing in 1997, and really don’t give a damn about your rankings. Pony up the dough, and I’ll help you come up with a real pretty powerpoint presentation made of important sounding statistics and graphs that don’t actually mean anything to show your boss how well our voodoo is working.

There are only a very small handful of search engines to worry about and those are all powered by an even smaller number of databases that you need to get your site submitted to--and some don't even require submission. Anyone telling you they are submitting to hundreds of search engines may be following the letter of the law but is definitely violating the spirit.

7. We would never do anything that violated the SE’s insanely ambiguous webmaster guidelines.
…we’re huge pussies that don’t experiment with anything except meta-tags, or have fed our clients so much sh*t over the years that we’re starting to believe it ourselves.

I'll just leave this one alone...

8. Most companies AREN’T number one for their own name.
Most of OUR clients don’t rank for their own name, because we never bothered to get them a link.

The main goal of most search engines is to deliver relevant results. If you are searching for a company's name, you expect the company's web site to be number one. If your agency or SEO does their job, it will be easy for the search engine to do theirs.

9. There’s no benefit in SEO, we can’t track it like PPC.
We don’t know how to do it and it seems kinda hard.

Anything can be tracked in some form or another. It just depends on how much time and money it is worth to track it.

10. Cool flash pages and user experience are more important than SEO
Get rid of the $5,000 flash intro page? That would destroy the whole user experience (and you’d probably be p*ssed if we admitted we were wrong!)…so what if they can’t find you on a search for your name, they can just type in your domain name. Not that many people really use search engines to find stuff anyways.

If your goal is driving traffic to your site, a Flash page or other intro page is going to hurt your rankings. It may look pretty but it won't help you with the search engines.