Domains Names - Hyphenated or Not?

(This was posted 7 months, 1 week, 4 days, 23 hours, 43 minutes's ago.)

As web developers we get asked many questions and one of them is whether to hyphenate a domain name.

If you Google the question you will find a number of different opinions, ours is relatively simple, the domain name is one of the most important parts of a website for small businesses when you look at optimisation.

We suggest you keep it as simple as you can for the search engines to understand, hyphens are treated as a break in the word so if you are an accountant in Southend the ideal domain would be www.southend-accountants.co.uk as that is a logical search term.

If you use www.southendaccountants.co.uk search engines sill look at the word ‘southendaccountants’ and try to make sense of it – it does not know where one word ends and the other starts.

If you are ‘Alexanders Accounts’ you can have for marketing purposes www.alexandersaccountants.co.uk as your domain name, simply buy that domain and forward it to www.southend-accounts.co.uk, the browser will not know the difference, but the latter will work much better than the former.

There is a cautionary note though, if we wanted to have www.knowitallwebguys.co.uk we would not register www.know-it-all-web-guys.co.uk as this is frowned upon. Our experience is that you can have two hyphens but no more.

So there you are, just a little food for thought, have a great online time!