When launching a website nowadays, keeping search engines in mind can be crucial to the success of the launch.

If noone can find your site, how will you get visitors? If you cannot get visitors, how do you get advertisers and generate revenue?
So naturally, you will need to do some work to improve your site towards search engines.

Unfortunately, the land of the search engines is a mysterious land, inhabited by misty swamps and shadows. What is real and what is myth? Your project manager and company executives will most likely have heard something or other "neat trick" that they think will bring the site to the top of Google's results.

I have had a personal experience with a manager, who said that while he did not know anything about search engines, he could prove what was important.
The proof? He did a search on Google and pointed out all the times that the searched word was highlighted in the results, thus stating that it was obvious that the words should be e.g. in the URL of a page. When I politely pointed out that it was just how Google presented the search results and not necessarily used in the search, he acknowledged that - but went on to show it to the people in Marketing.