Hyphenated names

[alaska56]

Ok I was watching an online tutorial for SEO on VTC.com and the tutor was suggesting that domains with a hyphen are possably ranked better.

He gave some exmaple like

lawyer-famlylaw-dallas-texas.com or the like would help rankings.
If you owned a law practice in Dallas.


What is the scoop on search engines namley goolge and hyphenated names?

I know the type in traffic would suffer but there are only a hand full of names that have good type in traffic anyhow.

Type-in is really good for repeat customers and I would guess that the example name would be hard to remember.

But all said and done if everything else is right do you get an avantage of having a keyword laden hyphenated domine name in the rankings?


Thanks

[DNGeeks]

I sort of answered this in another unrelated thread.

In my experiences a hyphenated domain will show up in a search engine with a better result than a non hyphenated name. When we build a site about chrysler engine sprockets we would name the page chrysler-engine-sprockets.html and the search engine would easily be able to categorize the page just by name as long as the content matches the name.

If the content and the page name match then you should get a better listing simply due to having a targeted page. The same goes with the domain name.

I have not tried to compare sites to see what really works however.

[DNPlan]

I know the type in traffic would suffer but there are only a hand full of names that have good type in traffic anyhow.

Type-in is really good for repeat customers and I would guess that the example name would be hard to remember.

In the world of search engine optimization, advantages are fleeting ... whether hypenated domain names still provide any significant advantage in the search engine's is unclear (yes, they definately used to) ...

If you are going to develop a website that you expect your visitors to only find once and never type directly in ... then a hypenated name sure will not hurt you ... however, if you expect any kind of attempt by people to type-in your domain name, it will almost certainly hurt you ...

So the question is do you think that the potential short term advantage of the search engine's more clearly finding keywords in your domain name outweighs the possibility of type in traffic ...

On a personal note ... I find long keyword hypenated domain names a little cheesy <grin> ... and so even when I do a search in a search engine, I tend to skip over the listings that have the hypens in their domain name <grin> ... not exactly a scientific assessment <grin> ...

Now that I said that <grin> ... guess what I used for a file name for an article I wrote titled What's In A Domain Name ...

http://www.dnplan.com/main-forum/3-s...main-name.html

Hmm <grin> ... so I'm not a fan of hypens in a domain name but I used them in a URL... does that sound contradictory <grin>????? Well ... the SEO software I use currently thinks that the hypens are beneficial ...

Greg