I want to launch a new site. I have not purchased a domain name. I have a lot of options. From the domain name I want the most bang for my buck. In this case I can include up to 3 short keywords in the domain name and remain true to the content of the site. Those key words will be used but not abused all over the site. I have to use at least two words for the name to make sense. This is good? Right? You get a little punch from having a keyword in the domain name? Not a silver bullet but it does help. How many searches per month does it take to make using a relative keyword worthwhile? And at what point does the competition get to be not work the effort? 4K, 800K, 41K, 353K and a lot of other numbers in between. Hyphens are best avoided?
Having keywords in your urls helps for two reasons: 1) It helps the search engines find your keywords and it may give you a small bump in the SERPs 2) It makes other webmasters more likely to use theekywords in their anchor text when they link your site which is very good for SEO And hyphens are better then no hyphens from a SEO point of view as they clearly delimit keywords in the domain and URL.
Thanks for your reply. As an example little-red-house-blog would be better than littleredhouseblog? Does everyone agree with the above statement?
Hmmm... I would agree that it might be better for SEO, but I would also warn you that people are less likely to remember to place hyphens inside a domain if they were trying to type it in from memory. Kind of a double edged blade, but if you think most of your traffic will be coming from SE's or other sites, you would probably be better off that way.
Exactly. How do you plan to market yoursite? If you want to do it primarily through search then use the hyphens. If you expect a lot of type in traffic leaving out the hyphens is recommended.
I would try this shoemoney tool to see if any nice combos of dashed names with your words are available. I find lots of sweet ones with this. http://dev.shoemoney.com/public-tools/domainfinder/
I would recommed to stay awy from hyphens if the domain is short or easy to read. Proper search engine optimization techniques should bring you the traffic and high ranking in SERPs.