Planning on registering a domain name and wondering if it should be hyphenated or unhyphenated?
There are many reasons why people use hyphen(s) in their domain names. Someone else could have already taken a keyword-rich domain name without the hyphen. Another reason could be because they think search engines can read with ease domain names that are separated by hyphens, take the examples of difficulttoreadme.com and easy-to-read-me.com. But this doesn’t mean hyphenated domains will benefit in terms of search engine rankings. Try searching Google using a keyword, and you will notice that sites with top rankings are usually unhyphenated. So ‘website ranking’ is altogether a different matter.
A hyphenated domain name can be difficult if you happen to be dictating it to someone else, say for example, over the phone. You can expect a lot of confusion over the “dash” and “hyphen” as in my-hyphenated-domain-name.com. Then, there is the probability of the person forgetting the hyphen altogether, and ending up in your competitor’s website. You can also not eliminate the possibility of an error occurring while typing his-rather-long-website-name.com. Generally, people find a hyphenated domain name rather awkward to use.
If you are thinking of unhyphenated domain names, you must ensure that they are understandable. Take the domain name globalcarnation.com. This is meant to be a website that talks about global cars, not carnation! In such instances, hyphens can be used to make it more clear-cut. This is also good for SEO since search engines will index global-car-nation.com with keywords related to cars. You just need to ensure you register the globalcarnation.com version also and that it re-directs to the domain containing the hyphen. This will ensure you get traffic even if the domain name has been typed without the hyphen, apart from protecting your domain name from cybersquatters.
The underlying fact is that most people are accustomed to unhyphenated domain names. However, if you are choosing a hyphenated one, make sure it is registered along with an unhyphenated counterpart. A domain name should not be just an unhyphenated version of someone else’s domain. This could pose a threat not only by way of your website losing traffic, but also by putting yourself at risk for domain hijacking.
If your desired domain name has already been taken, instead of simply going for the hyphenated version, look for a new unique keyword-rich domain name, and then register both versions yourself.
Tags: domain hijacking, domain hyphens, hyphenated domain names, registering a domain, search engines, unhyphenated domain names
