As information product publishers and marketers some of us tend to spend more time fretting over the intricacies of online marketing than others.
Truth be told, any writer, professional, or marketer who decides to boost their business or even start an entirely new business online knows that marketing is often more important than the actual creative process of writing, speaking or filming your information products.
One of the biggest challenges – getting search engines to index and rank your site appropriately so that your customers can find you when they want you – namely when their search query matches what you have to offer.
Most of the job in attracting search engines to first index, and than rank your web pages appropriately involves properly planning your web design and optimizing your pages and content to make it clear to the search engines what it is your webpage offers in terms of information.
But what about the domain name you choose?
How important is it that the domain name contain your keywords?
What if you have to add hyphens in order to secure a domain name with your intended keywords so that it looks something like www.example-like-this-for-you.com?
While I am not a search engine expert, I do operate dozens of domains, some hyphenated and most not.
Here are a few points that may help you decide hyphens in your domain name is the way to go:
- Domain names are one of many (some say hundreds) of factors major search engines take into account when ranking your web pages. While nobody knows for sure at any given time what weight is placed on each factor, it can surely be said that there are many more important factors to web search engine optimization than your domain name.
- Regardless of the search engine impact there is also an end-user impact (perhaps much more important) that domains containing many hyphens are spammy or non-professional. For that reason alone I would suggest you keep your hyphens to a minimum – no more than 1 hphen per domain name would be my rule
- I personally have not noticed any impact or change over time for my domains ranked that do contain hyphens, but do notice some other major changes such as optimizing titles, adding a blog and referencing content through a blog, getting backlinks from high authority sites naturally through use of Web 2.0 sites – so I wouldn’t be concerned with having one hyphen in your domain name
The bottom line – if you can find a domain name without a hyphen, that’s always my preference – having one hyphen, I wouldn’t be concerned. Anything beyond one hyphen in your domain name, I would seriously consider alternatives mainly due to the possible hit on perception of those who come to your site.
