“Submission is not necessary and does not guarantee inclusion in our index. Given large number of sites submitting URLs, it's likely your pages will be found in an automatic crawl before they make it into our index through URL submission form. We DO NOT add all submitted URLs to our index, and cannot predict when or if they will appear.” - http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/1.html#A2

“Meta tags are not important anymore”

Sure they aren’t. If you don’t want a decent ranking on MSN. The new MSN search places a lot of value on keywords and description meta tags. Without these tags in your site’s code, your ranking on MSN will suffer. Just as importantly, if your keywords and description meta tags don’t use proper language, your rankings will suffer. The description tag is also what MSN uses as visible description for a site in search results. And of course, to prove I’m not one blowing hot air, here is what MSN themselves say about it:

“Site descriptions are extracted from content of your page each time MSNBot crawls your site and indexes its pages...

...the best way to affect your site description is to ensure that your web pages effectively deliver information you want to see in search results.” - Click here to see page this is found on.

“Your Web Site Has Been Sabotaged”

This one is truly unreal. I can’t believe it’s even been used as an excuse for why an SEO company hasn’t achieved decent rankings for you. But alas, more than one SEO company has told potential clients of ours that reason they are not ranking well, or why their search engine optimization campaign is not effective, is because someone else has been sabotaging site. Some of clients who have been told this are small businesses, like bed and breakfasts or pet sitters. We always explain to these potential clients that likelihood of someone even having initial idea to sabotage a web site, site in question would have to be a fairly large one, and target of a lot of hatred. Why? Because sabotaging a web site’s rankings takes a massive amount of time and energy. We’re talking months, maybe even years of hard, hard work. Why would anyone devote months or years of their life to taking down a pet sitting site? Or a bed and breakfast?

Once again, these are some hefty claims and it is a clear sign that company who is running your SEO campaign is unwilling to be held accountable for their actions or lack thereof.

Don’t Put Up With It.

The bottom line is, your search engine optimization company works for you. You are paying them. Hold them accountable as you would any other vendor. Keep reading these articles, read info at search engines, educate yourself and if something your SEO says smells a little rotten, don’t be afraid to call them on it.

Is being screwed an inevitability in SEO world? Damn near. But thanks to increasing interest of our consumers in self-education and their increased questioning, our industry will slowly climb out of gutter and someday down line, send this article into antiquity. In spite of my pride, I’d be overjoyed to see that day come.

There’s another advantage to traditional search listings. They are considered unbiased and non-commercial. Traditional search performs very well at certain points in buying process. When consumers are gathering information about a purchase, they show a marked preference for traditional search listings. When they are ready to buy online, they seem to have less bias against paid placement listings and their likelihood to click on one of these listings increases.

The Dollars and Cents of SEO

Perhaps most compelling reason not to exclude SEO from your online marketing strategy comes down to dollars and cents. In an attempt to quantify business case for SEO I have gone back and done some analysis on three recent SEO engagements and results they achieved. I chose ecommerce clients that we had optimized and reviewed their average sales before and after SEO was implemented. In two of situations only change made was optimization of site. In another optimization occurred at same time we implemented a PPC campaign. In first two cases store sales rose 64% and 75% after SEO was implemented. In third case store revenue actually went up a staggering 169%, but if you back out sales that were a result of PPC campaign, store revenue that could be attributed to SEO improved by 49%. In other words, average improvement in store revenue that was apparently due to SEO was 62%.

Can we be sure that all of this was a result of SEO? No. There could have been product, seasonal and other effects that contributed. But I think it's safe to say that there was a significant increase that resulted directly from SEO. The bottom line: search optimization has a real and measurable impact on traffic, conversions and revenue (or lead generation) improvement. Given that these clicks begin to approach “free” after amortizing cost of SEO over time, ROI for SEO is compelling. Added to branding benefits no marketer or business owner should doubt value of search engine optimization.