Topic To hyphen or to not hyphen, that is the question

Donkey

I have recently wondered about this, should one use a hyphen in there domain name or no. I'm starting to think no (if the non-hyphen version is available), since it makes the domain a little more time consuming to enter.

Plus most people are so accustomed to just typing in the name as one word and adding dot com that this could cause people to not find your site right away. Then again it is kind of a trivial question, however I asked a few people before I recently registered another domain and they all said no hyphen.

So the question I pose to you is should one hyphen or should one not?

an example:

www.wickywicky.com

or

www.wicky-wicky.com

-HAL-

Get both..
Use the "hyphenated" domain as your main domain, and redirect the other to the site..

Generally domains without hypens are best to use, especially since they're easier to pronounce when telling about websites to others..
But for SEO purposes hyphens are (without a doubt) better IF you need to target two keywords...

I don't have time to write much now, but I'll get back to this one later..

Donkey

That isn't a bad idea, to get both.....

Please do explain more about the hyphen and SEO purposes I am very intrigued...

-HAL-

Earlier the domain name keywords mattered quite a bit for the search engines, but it doesn't seem to be that important today.

But there are still a few nice indirect advantages by separating keywords with hyphen in domain names.
Incoming links to your site are counted as "votes" for your sites, and the more "votes" you have the better your site ranks, right??
Almost right...

One important thing about links that many doesn't seem to know about is that the achor/link text is very important to search engines.
example
The link/anchor text actually tells the search engines quite a lot about what your site/page is about,
and they pay very much attention to it when calculating your ranking for specific keyword searches.
So if you sell "Nice Blue Widgets" and wants to target that search phrase in SEs
then it's very important to get many incoming links with that anchor text, or variations of it like this:
Here a SE sees that someone links to you with the anchor text "Nice blue widgets"
and then it gives (most of the time) a better ranking to your site when people search for that phrase.
And the more incoming links you have like that the better you will rank for that phrase..
But too many similar links isn't good either, so it's a good idea to vary the anchor text a bit to maybe
"Blue widgets", "Nice Widgets", "Blue Nice Widgets" etc...

And many just use the words "click here" as anchor text, and as you can see from this Google search
the competition for those "keywords" are pretty fierce..
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22click+here%22

But back again to hyphens...

And one of the most common ways to link to other sites, especially from blogs, forums, comments etc.
are just to type in the URL and the script antomatically creates a link.
That link will look something like this in the source code and for search engines, if you use hyphens in your domain:
And since search engines looks at hyphens as space and ignores the period mark,
then you will have the following words as anchor text for them "www keyword1 keyword2 com".

So as you can see there hyphens do matter when it comes to SEO since you get a "free" good
and targeted anchor text from links like that.
Google can separate some keywords even if you don't use a hyphen,
but it's much more difficult for SEs if you use keyword1keyword2.com ...
Just a quick example: Penisland.net
What's the keywords there???
Yep, it's Pen Island. A website that sells pens.. That was what you thought, right??

Donkey

Makes perfect sense and even when algorithms get advanced enough to separate out words in that are in a string you will still always have the problem you stated above with the pens...

So one should use the hyphen domain name when doing link exchanges and use the non-hyphen domain for word of mouth and other promotions...

-HAL-

If you choose to get two domains then use a 301 redirect from the extra one to your main domain.
Don't put the same content on both since that will result in duplicate content, and that's a big no-no..

It all depends on the use if you should need hyphens or not IMO.
If you focus on SEO and getting you visitors from search engines then a hyphen could be good, but for a more "pro" site where word of mouth etc. is important then I wouldn't use hyphens...

Donkey

So parking the hyphen domain onto the non-hyphened domain is bad?

-HAL-

Yes and no..

Forwarding a domain to another one using a 301 (permanent) redirect is ok, but using a 302 (temporary) redirect could be bad since it could create a "domain hijack" problem..
You can read mroe about that here at webmasterworld.com
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/28742-1-15.htm

If you're using Godaddy's forwarding then it's possible to choose if you want a 301 or 302 redirect now, but until year or so ago they (and most other registrars) used 302 redirects as default so it's a good idea to check that before using the redirect/forward option available through your registrar(s).

Hoggie

I think that hyphens are really bad because most people are not use to typing hyphens so they skip it or it takes longer to type.

anirban3598

Well its not just about hyphens. What people like about website names is if it is easy to remember. Adding hyphen is a bad idea but if you don't get any good website name then i think its best to use hyphens. (and try to have the main keyword on your domain name)