Hi there, I want to know that how does a hyphenated domain name performs from SEO point of view. e.g. dogs-food.com, snooker-team.com etc. Any help will be highly appreciated. Best Regards bushib
They act is a separator for some search engines to identify different words in your URL. However, Google is pretty good at picking out the words even without hyphenation. Here's an interesting Matt Cutts blog post about hyphens and underscores: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
As the others have said, they work as keyword separators. [Edit: I incorrectly stated that Google uses underscores instead of dashes as keyword separators. In fact, they use dashes instead of underscores, but are including underscores as separators soon, if they haven't done so already. I apologize for the inconvenience.] If you don't use dashes or underscores as keyword separators just be careful. You may think that expertsexchange.com may be "Experts Exchange" but another person (or even a search engine spider) may read that as "Expert Sex Change" instead.
Also be careful with hyphens if you want people to spread news of your website by word of mouth. Many people will say "dog food.com" instead of "dog dash food.com" That being said, I use hyphens for my url's, and google seems to like my site fine.