Title tag

Does a hyphen help?

[duhboy]

Hello all
I have noticed that in many SERP's related to my site, there is often a hypen
in the title description of sites with better search results. I realize that there are many other factors involved here but this one makes me wonder.
For example: Blue Widgets - The best blah blah blah
In my site I have: Blue Widgets The best blah blah blah

Could the exclusion of the hyphen affect the rankings?
It seems to be a small item, yet I see it used often.
Does the hyphen act as some kind of delimiter or is there more to this than I realize?

Thanks once again for your interest, Duhboy.:)

[korkus2000]

I think most people with keyword rich titles use - to delimite the title to make them more intelligable. You are probably seeing the - come up in the top rankings because those pages have nice titles and are optimized. I think it is not the - that gets them to the top but an optimized keyword rich title.

[Sinner_G]

Seconding korkus. You musn't forget that your title is often the first thing people see on SERP. If it is complete rubbish (as opposed to good english), they are less likely to go there.

[deejay]

Sinner G's got it.

No, I don't think the hyphen 'helps' the ranking in any way, but if it contributes to a more reader-friendly title, you'll get more clicks out of wherever you are ranked.

[fathom]

For example: Blue Widgets - The best blah blah blah
In my site I have: Blue Widgets The best blah blah blah

why not just

Widgets

with a link going to a page on Blue Widgets, Red Widgets, White Widgets and so on

and the backlink from these pages to Widgets where the anchor text is the same as the title attribute for the link.

The more words you add (and the less relevant those words are) the less important you are to the person and the engine.

Short is more noticeable to SEyes that scan (not read) and more relevant to the query - hence if someone was looking for Blue Widgets and came across just Widgets I really don't think they would take a pass.

[Marcia]

I've always used hyphens in page titles, from when I first started out, not for anything to do with ranking, but as punctuation. It seems to make titles readable, giving a pause in between phrases. It also separates what could be two separate thoughts in the title and seems like a good transition if I'm optimizing a page for two phrases, or even just one with a brief description after.

I've also found it handy if I'm repeating a keyword at the very beginning and further on in the title, though that I never do consecutively.

I've never even thought of it having anything to do with improving rankings; it's strictly been for as much sentence structure as you can get in a page title.

[pageoneresults]

> I've always used hyphens in page titles, from when I first started out, not for anything to do with ranking, but as punctuation.

I concur with Marcia. I've used them for as long as I can remember. I'll sometimes have a company name at the end of a title and will separate it with a hyphen. Maybe I'm building pages for a particular equipment model. I'll put the core keyword phrase at the beginning, then a hyphen, then the model name and number if applicable.

I also concur with Fathoms' short and to the point suggestion. Although, I'm guilty of longer titles myself, I've seen the power of the short ones! My long ones do just as well taking all other factors into consideration.

[mahlon]

We have, Blue Widgets: Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla Bla I always wondered if we should use - .