After looking at stats for years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the dashes or hyphens are a good thing.

When to hyphen, when not to hyphen

If you are choosing a url that people will have to type in and you have more than one hyphen, you’re going to end up sending people to the competition’s website.  What I’m saying is that if you have a brick and mortar store and you expect customers to go from your ad to your website, brick-and-mortar-store.com is going to pose a cerebral challenge.

So in short, if your name is over 3 words, dashing is not a good idea if you are expecting people to type it in.  But it will do pretty well in the search engines. On the other hand, if you are just our-store.com with one hypen, they might just do that from a business card if you make the - large and obvious enough.

If you are mostly internet, and your traffic comes from the internet, then hyphens work better than underscores. People can click on a link instead of typing it in so you eliminate their human error.  However, if you used underscores in the past on html pages (i.e. yourstore.com/my_page.html) and you’re thinking of going back to change them, you risk losing rank you have established. It probably doesn’t hurt you if the page is established and been up a while. But you’ll want to go with dashes for new pages. But again, if your site is already indexed, this isn’t going to be a huge barrier. This is mostly advice for new sites and new pages to help push you up faster.

You could duplicate one page with underscores and make one with dashes just to experiment. Why not?

But the dashless .com is taken

Let’s face it, those urls get bought up fast and dashes must sometimes be used because you already have a company and an LLC and it’s the only thing available. You can get a doman registrar to send you an email if the dashless version of the domain name becomes available even if you’ve already bought the one with dashes. That way you can buy the dashless and redirect it to the one you purchased and have your site on. But no one wants to wait umpteen years to get a website up and running. So you go for the dashed to get it done.

Consider your marketing plan and objectives

If, for example, you are going to do XM radio, then you need to keep in mind the number of digits that will show on the display. You don’t want to have it be cut off so people go to brick-and-mortar-sto and be confused. (I will have to look on my xm to see how many digits can be displayed.) You want one short enough so that the whole url shows.

So you can do mystore.com/this-great-page.html. You don’t advertise this-great-page.html. If you run an ad and the information you mention in your ad is on that page, you drive them to your landing page and you make sure there is a visual device or element from your ad so they find it fast, click on it and get to that page.

These are just a few hyphen marketing considerations to think about when you are choosing a name or naming pages.  Do not expect to be catapulted to the top of Google for using dashes. It can merely give you a bit of a boost instead of underscores. It’s your content and links, <h1> and title tags that will give you the biggest boost.