As many small business owners have discovered over the years, you can have the best product in the world and still fail to make a go of your business model simply because not enough people knew you existed for you to make a profit. In the old days, getting the word out meant handing out flyers, locating your shop in a high traffic part of town, and buying some advertising space in the local paper or on the radio station. But what about today, when many businesses don't even have a physical storefront? That's where search engine optimization comes in.

Search engines are how everyone finds the things that they need. No one looks in the yellow pages or just drives out to the mall to see what they can find. Before they move from their house, they want to know where they can get what they want and how much it is. But it's not enough just to have a website with this information on it. People need to be able to find it. That means knowing which words people are typing into the search engine bar to find businesses like yours and where your website ranks on the results list that the search engine spits out. The more relevant your site is to the search terms, the higher on the list you will be.
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There are some measures you can take yourself, such as making sure your webpage content contains the words that people associate with your type of business and your location, but other measures, such as building a network of pages that link to yours to boost your exposure, is better done by a Toronto search engine optimization company. If your site is not on the first page of the search results, you need help. Studies have shown that as much as 80% of people click on the very first link in the results and never even look at the list below! So unless you've got the time and computer skills to build your linkage and exposure online, you should run your own search engine query - this time for companies that will help you climb the list of results. If the Custom Cookie Co. wanted to be found on page one for their cookie making business, they should speak with SEO experts.