Often when developing your new site on one of the platforms I wrote about (weebly review, squidoo review, tumblr review...) you have a choice to pick up a subdomain name. So if your niche is laptopskins your site will be something like laptopskins.tumblr.com.
Obviously you want your keywords in your subdomain name. That helps with SEO and brings you higher in search results. But sometimes it is hard for a search engine to split your keywords if they are written all together. Although google says they can split your words pretty good, you are still not sure. Adding dashes (or hyphens) will sometimes be necessary to help out the search engine with your words. However, dashes lengthen your website address and also make it harder for users to remember. So you want to use dashes only if you really have to. How can you tell?
To find out if you need dashes in your subdomain name or not go to google and type your keywords (allconnectedtogether). If you get a "Did you mean?" hint from google with your words split up, you are safe to use it without dashes. Otherwise dashes might be necessary.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Proper use of dashes in domain name explained
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4 comments:
Nice and useful tip, I have talked about it here
Great advice. I never would've thought to suggest seeing if Google would recognize it as separate words that way.
Very useful info - thanks!
Good read there, appreciate the article. I do a little writing also and did some number crunching and comparing on domains with dashes. Its worth a read to anyone who is interested. In my opinion it all comes down to the links you have to your site.
Hope you dont mind me dropping a link :)
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