Let's say that I'd like to start a site about mountain bikes and - could you imagine - www.mountainbikes.com is already taken. In your opinion, what would be the best alternative (I'm sure that everyone will pick the same option ) www.mymountainbikes.com www.mountain-bikes.com www.mountainsbikes.com (Let's assume that branding is not important since this domain will be forwarded to the domain with the brand name) And would the search engines care if there are 1 or 2 hyphens?
Hi, My thoughts are: I would always for for www.mountainbikes.com. If that were taken I may go for www.bestmountainbikes.com rather than hyphens. people do not use hyphens in the usual typing so I would avoid if possible. I have had success with a hypnen domain name with no issues that I was aware of but still the best domain (foe me) is one that describes the site in plain language, uses the keyword/phrase of choice using the language that would be used in everyday life or a catchy shortened version. Dave
Well, what would the site be about? (Let's stick to your mountain bikes example.) Would it be a site to buy them, review them, a community of mountain bike owners? Or something else entirely? (Like how to build a mountain bike.)
I'd be looking for long tail keywords. Who searches using hyphens? I use Market Samurai and to the longtail searchs. Not only do you get better keyword phrases but it costs way less. Just set the minimum daily clicks to find only those with say.... 800 searches a day for you your longtail keyword. One of my adult sites, for example, I used "Sex Toys" and "Victoria's Secret" togeter to form "Secret Sex Toys". Sex toys get 49,000 searches a day and Victoria Secret gets over 200,000 searches. (yes.... we're all pigs..ladies) So when I bid for exact match and broad match my costs are quite low. Nick.
Try to avoid using the hyphens, it is not good for SEO. Among the three, i prefer www.mymountainbikes.com
Wrong, lifeplayer. It's not bad, it mainly separates keywords, and is sometimes critical. Do you think Experts Exchange would love to rank for "Experts Exchange" as well as "Expert Sex Change" if it didn't have the hyphen in its domain name?
I suggestion for you to avoid symbols on your URL. Try to get plain text url if it is possible to you.
it does not matter if you use hyphen or simple text in the url , it should be user friendly and search engine too
As I've said before, it can matter when the keywords can be spliced to form new search terms. The most famous example being "Experts Exchange" -- I doubt the popular tech forum wants to rank well for "Expert Sex Change" so they use the hyphen in their domain name to explicitly tell Google and the other search engines that "Experts Exchange" are the only keywords in their domain name.
I wonder how the search engings look at that. I suppose that, when you use mountainbikes.com you get a big bonus for those searches. I just wonder if, when someone searches for "mountain bikes", a domain like bestmountainbikes.com or bluemountainbikes.com gets the same bonus as mountainbikes.com. In other words, would the search engines ignore the first part then.
Hyphens and underscores are better ways for search engine optimization as well as better understanding. If you take a look at ur blog url's then you will find lots of hyphens seperated by words, that's automatically generated by wordpress or blogger software. If putting all words together would be better optimization then these great softwares would not produce such url. Using hyphens and underscores make ur url easy to understand as well as crawl. There may be urgues for either hyphen or underscore, but both can be used for better optimization.
Try to avoid hypens with domain names as it lowers it appeal on google indexing. Try to think of alternative words instead if you can't avoid it. I hope that helps.