An inseparable part of growing a small business is launching a website which will help to attract more customers and sell your product or service. One of the crucial steps while working on website’s visibility is registering the right domain name.
Perfectly, it will be the same as the name of your company. Since there are numerous businesses out there, it is very hard to achieve that, and you’ll need to compromise by using some special characters, dashes or underscores.
The main question is following: Will dash, minus or hyphen affect ranking in search results? Most business owners are not sure which way to go, and the text below should give you some guidelines which may be very helpful.
The word about the Dash
Before you purchase your domain, it is good to learn how Google as search engine treats web page URLs with underscores. You should start thinking as Google’s developer when it comes to using those characters.
That way, you can easily see how they think, and where are their roots. The answer is simple, their background is in coding and programming. There is a simple rule that goes with every programming language: If you have a command or variable named _MAXINT, it will have completely different meaning than MAXINT.
So, if you choose that your domain name contains keyword1_keyword2, the search engine will return results just in case someone typed the exact match. This outcome is pretty impossible, and that’s the main reason why you should avoid underscores in your URL. On the other hand, if you go for the dash, your URL will look something like keyword1-keyword2.
In this scenario, Google will be returning results if someone types “keyword1” or “keyword2” separately, and even when someone searches “keyword1 keyword2”. This means that Google will recognize dash as space, so rest assured Google won’t penalize you.
Should you use the dash or not?
It is clear by now that using an underscore while picking the domain name is bad practice and it looks like using a dash is way better, and it won’t negatively affect your website’s SEO. Search engines will treat the URL with a dash, the same way they do it when there is a white space.
The reason why the dash is treated this way is simple: This character is the most used separator in the English language, and Google’s developers recognized that. Of course, there are some divided opinions floating online, so it is good to get informed about them as well.
Negative arguments
Your domain will look unprofessional if there are dashes included – Unfortunately, there is a popular misconception that the website named earnmoneyeasy.com looks more professional and will increase more traffic than earn-money-easy.com. This is not true at all, and experts from GWM Company agree that dash won’t harm your website’s SEO, and it will be treated as space.
People don’t like typing a dash – Well yes, this is actually a good argument. Try to remember how did you type the name of any site in your browser. That’s right, you wrote it down as one word without using any dashes and added .com at the end. Even when you are aware that given domain includes dashes, you’ll just go and ignore them while searching.
Keep that in mind when choosing domain name since your competitor may have the same one without a dash, and you’ll lose some traffic over that. You don’t want this to happen, so make sure to search for your competition and differentiate from them.
Dash is complicating the name of domain – When someone asks you what is the name of your website, it is a little complicated to explain to them how the dash or hyphen looks like. That may cause you some trouble since there are people who may write down a slash or underscore instead of a dash.
You should be aware that there are a lot of people who don’t have proficient computer skills and those characters may be unfamiliar to them.
Including dashes will make domain name longer – This is partly true, but that’s not an argument you should consider too much while choosing to use a dash or not.
Positive arguments
Your website’s search engine optimization won’t suffer if you go with dashes in the domain name. Having that in mind, the strongest argument why you should use dashes in the URL is for readability. Your domain name will look much better and appealing.
In addition, it will be recognizable when compared with URLs without dashes. This argument is getting even stronger if your domain name has two words, and the last letter of the first one is the same as the beginning letter of the second one.
If this is the case, it can easily happen someone can’t find you because they missed typing that double letter. You’ll agree that medical-lecturer.com looks way better than medicallecturer.com.
Conclusion
The information provided above should help you while purchasing a domain name. Keep in mind to avoid underscores, and freely use dashes, or don’t use anything at all. You can choose the option that suits you best. The success of your business will mostly rely on the quality of the product and your selling skills, but it is good to be well-informed and aware of all details.
About the Author
Ronald Wolf works as a business consultant at a small Australian company Media Gurus, and also a freelance writer. In his free time, he enjoys playing pool, reading a good book or just being outdoors with his dogs.
Source: SEO For Growth