seperate key words or not

[ndfox]

I belive, and I may be wrong, that it can help to place keywords in my domain. If so, I have 2 questions. My example is based on the city of san francisco and a two word service.

1. Should I choose my domain with all the words together
Ex. - word1word2sanfrancisco.com, or should I place dashes between the words, Ex. - word1-word2-san-francisco or any particular combination of -'s and seperation of key words?

2. How long is to long of a domain name?

Thank You
Nolan

[scottiecl]

If you absolutely must have a keyworded domain name, use the dashes. It won't help you much in the actual on-page factors for ranking but if other sites link to you using your domain name, the words will be parsed into separate words and give you a teeny, tiny, advantage.

I'd be more concerned with picking a domain name that was easy to say and remember that was appropriate for the company.

[scottiecl]

For more info see:

http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=8271&highlight=hyphens

[Kal]

Hi Nolan and welcome :hi:

Scottie's right on the money. A few years ago it was believed that keyword-rich domains could give your site a ranking advantage in the search engines over domains without keywords. But for search engines to be able to distinguish individual keywords, a hyphen should be included between them. So now you have the Internet filled with all these long-winded, hyphenated domains (including my own :rolleyes: )

But the thing is, if this technique provided any advantage before, it has since been well-eroded by other more important techniques such as high quality links to your site and fresh, relevant content. In fact, rumor has it that some search engines may be introducing hyphen penalties in future - using their spam filters to locate sites using an excessive number of hyphens in their domain name and applying a slight ranking penalty to those sites. This is only rumor mill material for now, but it's better to be safe than sorry eh? Choose your domain name based on your company name, product or service and make it memorable or logical enough for your customers to remember and type :thumb:.

[Dan0]

The best advice right now is probably to focus on branding with your domain name, not search engines. If these ugly keyword-keyword-keyword.com domain names made a huge difference, you'd see it in the search results.

Try a search on Google for "search engine optimization." Do you see any of those names in the top 10? Nope. There's one at #20, but they aren't using those words in the name. You have to go to the third page to find a site that has "searchengineoptimization" in the domain name, and there are none in the top 50 that use those words with dashes.