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. (more…)