“Past investments are over, lost, gone forever. They are irrelevant to the future.”

Seth Godin’s recent post “Ignore sunk costs” shows a photo of a store front sign with the largest word spelled incorrectly, and suggests that “just because the guy spent a lot on the sign for his store doesn’t mean he shouldn’t spend more to spell the biggest word properly. The amount he already spent is irrelevant. What matters is what the benefit of spelling ’stationery’ properly will be.”

The same concept can be applied to your website. Yes, you may have sunk several thousands of dollars into having your website built 5 years ago,  but a lot has changed since then. More people have hi-speed internet access, better monitors, web browsers are more sophisticated and above all, web users are way more savvy and have higher expectations from websites that they visit. So, what have you done with your website since you had it done 5 years ago?

I know. You paid good money to have all that fancy Flash® animation done, and made sure that Pachelbel’s Canon plays on every page, but who cares? No, really, WHO CARES? Does it convert? I mean, are people actually going back to your website and saying, “OMG, I LOVE all those Flash® animations! I think I’ll buy more of their products!” NO! And I’m not speaking just about the “design” of your site, I’m talking usability, conversions, and yes… SEO.

Simply put, just having a brochure-type website and hoping that “If I build it, they will come” just doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to rethink your web presence. Don’t think about how much money you spent to have it done. That initial investment has already paid for itself. If it hasn’t, all the more reason to do something about it.

Like Seth says, “When making a choice between two options, only consider what’s going to happen in the future, not which investments you’ve made in the past.”

The term “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) has been abused and seems to have become a catch-all for anything and everything related to increasing search engine ranking/visibility and user traffic to a given website. As I see it, “optimization” is the act of making the website easy for search engine bots and spiders (and bears, oh my!) to crawl through a website and parse the content easily. So, that would include things like:

• Making a website standards compliant
• Appropriate use of “alt” attributes on images
• Appropriate use of “title” tags (and attributes)
• Using CSS for layout (thus making the HTML more compact and easier to get through)
• Use of appropriate content and keywords

The list above won’t do much to increase your rankings in the search engines unless your competition is nonexistant on the web. So, what needs to be done to actively pursue increasing your ranking in the search engines? Well, that is where “Search Engine Marketing” (SEM) comes in. With an active search engine marketing campaign, you can cultivate your website over time and show those search engines that you have a site that is well taken care of and relevant to people.

Websites should not be viewed as static bits of code that just “sit there” until someone stumbles across them. They should not be put out on the web just “to have something out there”. With a nurturing environment, a website can grow and thrive and attract a community of users that value what the site has to offer. Just like people need to be taken care of and encouraged, websites need frequent attention to be seen as successful, high-ranking sites in the eyes of search engines (and users).