if you are going to buy a domain which is the best format to buy one in. for example I have a site I am building and I had to create a domain name for it. It is long because it is in a very competitive field. so should I go with ex. bestchildrensclothing.com or best-childrens-clothing.com that is not the actual domain just an example also is having 4 words in your domain too many? Thank you for your help I am a regular over at seoelite forum but I decided to move here because of the large user base this site has.
I guess I would keep the best out of the domain name if possible. I think alot of people would search for childrens clothing so I would take the best out and look for a .info domain or something thats not taken if it exists, maybe you have already tried that though. As far as which of those two is better I imagine they are about even, I dont think hyphens count but if i had to ask myself which would be ranked higher or course I would say without the hyphens.
My site is not even in the clothing niche. It is in the dieting niche so why wouldn't you use the word best in your url? for example if all the urls for dieting-secrets is gone then why would using best-dieting-secrets be bad? Thanks for your help
I personally like the hyphenated versions because they make it easy for people to read. I assume none of my traffic comes from typeins so the hyphens don't matter. Domains are cheap though so if I can, I will register both the hyphenated and non and point one to the other.
Avoid hyphens... people forget them when they try to remember domains! As for SEO properties, they both have the same value with or without hyphens.
Don't go for domains with hyphens. Also try to look for domains with your targeted keyword. Whether it is .info, .com or .biz doesn't matter.
Just because people will miss the hyphens out when they try to remember your site, and they will go to the site without the hyphen. But I get zero type-ins, so I don't mind if it has hyphens. Depends on where you are getting traffic. If people are coming to you from the SEs or from clicking links, the hyphens will not hurt. DD
In my view, there is nothing wrong with hyphens domain name, but it is better if you can do without it. A domain name with targeted keyword is also good, but you may not be able to convert the site for other things in future and .com domain name sell very well.
The hypens aren't good if you are aiming to create a brand or something like that. Also, if you need to approach people to buy or exchange links, they may refuse if they feel that the link looks spammy.
I recommend having your domain name without hyphens. Domain names without hyphens are easier to type, giving other visitors easy access to the site giving more traffic.
choose domain name without hyphens and alwasy keep in mind the domain without hyphens is rebrandable, you change the them of site anytime
From a visitor stand point, I would want to see a shorter name and a dot com name. Non seo people are more willing to trust a dot com and a shorter name will help them remember. Branding is important even if you aren't really selling anything. Just imagine if Google was under the domain: thetopsearchengine.com . Sure people would remember that, but it's MUCH easier to remember AND type in google. Having your keyword in the domain definitely helps, but it doesn't take that much more work to get a good rank without the keyword in your URL.
Better not to use hyphens as it makes it more difficult to type in and may lead the user to enter the URL wrongly. A URL with hyphens to separate the keywords is better for SEO, however this is marginal.
Hyphens are ok if kept below three. Going without them also helps people with remembering the domain.
At this point, based on the advice in the thread, it looks like you have a choice of doing whatever you want, or giving up in despair