Our new(er) website(1.5+ yrs) continually gets spanked by our main competitor.

The then new VP of Marketing(now marketing manager) hired a "boutique" ad agency that re-did said website(and in that last year+ has spent over 400K, with a company whose website proclaims "...offers Madison Avenue advertising agency capabilities ranging from original campaign development to creative production studios to targeted media planning and placement services.")

Well the ad agency might be good for print/video/slicks but their web creativity has left us on the bottom of page 2 using google (up from page 3, after rewording some meta tags and home page verbage). They assured us that they had a "SEO specialist" but nothing was put into writing about raising/maintaining a set level

Sales(me/others) have been screaming that we really NEED/MUST get our ranking up. We're in a small niche market with sales of ~4M/yr.

To quote an e-mail received this past Friday-"...several media companies will also be meeting with us as we move into a strategy of employing our advertising dollars to gain more clicks to our website."

The CEO is hot to have streaming video on the site and we have a quote in from yet another "specialty" agency for (sit down and hang on for this one) 7,500/month as a retainer fee.

Sales feels that if clients can't find us on the first page of any major search engine, we could have nude videos on there and it really wouldn't matter.

So what's the one thing that you'd recommend to get ranking up?

Google link: ourwebsite.com shows 55 sites linked to us
as does alexa.com. But most of the links are very dated and from things like old academic articles or nonexistent job openings(competitor shows 245)

1. Pay per click ads
2. Hire a guru(and lord there must be 2 million of em in
our small town of 165,000 people)to tweak things?(with
an SLA to back things up)
3. Current site is Flash on the home page-get rid of it?
4. Get many more and better quality links?-currently only
one of our distributors does.
5. Start blogging like crazy with links to our site.
6. Submit site map to google
7. Banner ads somewhere?
8. WHAT else?????????

Thanks for ANY and all input on This