If key words in domain help

Is it better to separate them with hyphens?

[umbria]

It's been mentioned several times here that having your target key words in your domain name helps your ranking on google. I wonder how good google is at finding those keywords in a domain name without the help of spaces that delimit words in normal text. I wonder if it's better to separate them with hyphens.

For example is "milan-kundera-novel.com" better than "milankunderanovel.com" for google's purposes, or will google find the words in both of them. If so, what about"zmilankunderanovelz.com"?

Any thoughts?

[willtell]

GG is software and hence it can only make a few choices. Finding a complete match on a word without haveing to parse it would seem a logical thing to do. If no matches are found on complete words, the next best thing would be to find the word within other words.

The other side of the equation is that you have to think about your customers. People scan very quickly, if they cannot instantly determine that the url might be what they are looking for, chances are they will bail. In order to quickly help your customers determine if your site is what they are looking for, you should make every effort to make it readable.

Unless you are just trying to brand your name and don't care about real customers, then you need to do everything to narrow down your potential customers quickly. One way to do this by having the url help identify what you do.

Hope this helps.

[IanTurner]

I think it is a close call between the two as far as rankings go. My own personal preference is to have hyphens for reasons of readability - as willtell says if a customer recognises your domain name quickly they may be more likely to click through.

I also think that across the spectrum of search engines hyphenated is more effective than not.

[candidboy]

I agree with IanTurner, hyphen is certainly better from SEO point of view.
But the only flip is that for a return visitor it is tough to remember the name with hyphen.

The other wayout can be to register both domains and forward the one without hyphen to the one with hyphen.
Also don't host or submit the other website (without hyphen) to search engines, just to stay clear from any spam problems. In fact many domain registrars provide free url forwarding. (like stargateinc.com)

On a personal note: Hyphen certainly yields better results in google :)

[Beachboy]

Yes, I agree with CandidBoy, I often recommend the same thing.

[web_india]

I too follow similar strategy for many of my clients as candidboy mentioned.
If the purpose of the site is to generate visitors from search engines only, then host your main site at the hyphenated domain and submit this to search engines. For offline purposes, also register company name as the new domain and simply point this domain to the other domain. Don't mention this domain online anywhere - use it only for offline ads.

[ciml]

Although GoogleGuy prefers hyphens, I don't see keywords in domains having a great direct effect on Google.

On the other hand, anything that helps to get the words in incoming link text can help a great deal so I would go with the hyphen too.