I was able to register my keyword as a .com but with a hyphen in between the words. There is already a fairly popular site with the keyword and NO hyphen. My site will be a music portal for this certain genre of music, completely different than the site without the hyphen. My question is.. will this hurt me in generating traffic and fully developing this site as a community? Should I use another domain? I've read a million times that a hyphen doesn't hurt in search engines, but will visitors be able to remember the hyphen? Are there any special methods of marketing a domain with a hyphen? Regards, Bacon
search-wise i think the hyphen will be excellent.. if your domain is music-man.com then you will rank well for searches on music, on man, and especially searches on "music man" .. if your competitor's domain is musicman.com he will not get any domain-name juice for any of these searches.. be sure to create URLs with hypens too. if you use those same words such as music-man.com/good-music or music-man.com/i-am-the-music-man you will rank very well for searches that contain those words.. as far as visitors remembering the hyphen, that is not as good because it does make it more complicated and harder to remember..
Is it so bad that I should find a new name to use? It's not easy to find a good name in this niche... I've been searching for awhile now.
since you will probably be getting more traffic via SE traffic and links, and very little by word of mouth (meaning nobody will need to remember it) i would keep it.. What is it? post it or PM me..
For music portal site I would suggest to go for .tv tld, there are chances that you will get more brandable name.
I have been looking at lots of keyword domains and YES dashes are In Like Flynn. Go for it before it's too late.