White Hat Guys

Your domain name is your registered domain name - like http://www.mydomain.com. You don’t have a lot of flexibility with a domain name but your main focused keyword term MUST be part of the domain name, otherwise you will hurt your future rankings within the search engine results.

In order to get any decent SEO ranking help your keyword absolutely must be within your domain name. This helps from both a search engine perspective and also a consumer perspective.

The ranking boost is increased many times over when your domain name exactly matches the keyword being searched for by your potential visitor. However, past abuses have now dictated some unwritten restrictions and warnings that you must keep in mind when searching for your new domain name.

To hyphen or not?

A few years back, hyphenated keywords, found within some domain names, enjoyed some ranking advantages. Not that long ago keyword-keyword-keyword.com had a major boosting effect on your SE rankings.

Hyphens were used to seperate the “text” so the search engines could more easily distinguish each keyword within your domain name - without the engines mistaking it for some new unique search term. However, today the major engines are getting better and better at picking keywords out of a phrase without the help of those dashes (hyphens) - at least on English language sites.

With the ever increasing intelligence of the Search Engine bots that didn’t last very long. The engines quickly realized many sites were using this hyphen technique to acheive some unfair advantages.

The Search Engines then began counting the hyphens and domain name character lengths. Soon they established a correlation between multiple dashes and long domain names with most of the spam sites. As a result it took them very little time to then restrict how high a long, multi-dashed domain name could rank with the serps (search engine result pages).

As a result we now recommend a maximum of two dashes in your domain name. Obviously the shorter your domain name is the better for search engines AND the consumer. In a perfect world your best domain name will contain your primary keyword, or keyword combination. However, since that is not always possible, at least try to get your top ranked keyword within your domain name.

So today, whenever faced with a choice, we highly recommend you favor the keywordkeyword.com over the hyphenated keyword-keyword.com URL. It is also advised for you to secure both type domain names to keep the hyphenated one out of the hands of your current, or future, competitors. Still you will be better off developing the domain name without the hyphen as your primary site!