The best way to URL a domain

[thebaron]

Hi folks hope you are all keeping well!

I want to register a domain a 3 word one.
Anyone know what is the best way to register it?

I will explain

Say you want a domain with the key words "dining in chester"

is is best to have www.dininginchester.com

or is it better to do www.dining-in-chester.com

or another way?, or does it not matter?

Looking forward to your ideas

Thanks

Brian

[Donald]

Hi Brian,

I don't think it matters mate, they both would be ok. Choose which one you think is best. Good luck with that one mate.

Donald

[valpubs]

Brian

It doesn't really matter to the searcher how your URL is written but, for SEO purposes it would be better to have the URL without hyphens

[Jim Burney]

Brian

It doesn't really matter to the searcher how your URL is written but, for SEO purposes it would be better to have the URL without hyphens

Brian,

I agree with Val.

Often confused about this myself but on research found that without hyphens was the preferred method for SEO purposes.

Jim

[padre]

The information that is provided by Flippa indicates that a domain with hyphens will sell for 26% less money than the same domain without them.  If you plan on selling the site then your most profitable URL will be hyphen-less.

The other potential drawback is that people often type in an address without the hyphen and you could be sending potential visitors to the competition.

Cheers

[thebaron]

Thanks everyone

I have had a search around and found that Google treats the hypens as a separator (space) and really does not make much difference.

Padre your note about Flippa seems that if there is a differnce then it is "on the eye" I guess hypens are not pleasing to look at (and also you would have to remember to put them in)

So thanks again all lesson learned my next domain will have no hypens


Thanks
Brian

[Countess]

I think that if I saw this url, and remembered it to use later, I might not remember the hyphens

I personally think simplest is always best with urls.

I quite recently had an issue with one I had remembered from the side of a window cleaning van.. it was something like 'wetwindowzareus.co.uk'


But of course by the time i got home and wanted to use it, i couldn't remember whether it was am 'r' or 'are' and was the windows bit really spelt with a z as i thought, and was there something else on the end?

I got my windows cleaned by another company, one with a simple domain name, hehe

[Cal]

Hi Brian,
I will get both of them.. will help you rank faster and higher in the search engines...
and if you do advertising on line and print, the one with hyphen is much easy to read
and in case someone forgets the hyphen you will still be showing up in searches = win win..

Plus you can have the sites a bit different = color schema etc and test which one pulls better..

Use different key words related to what you sale.
Ex:
no hyphen  =  your major main key word starting
with hyphen = second major main keyword starting

Hope this helps..
Best wishes,
Cal

[Countess]

^ Brilliant idea :-)

[KarenMcG]

Well, I can see I'm late to the party again as all the great ideas have been taken! 

We had Internet connections for 6 hours yesterday so that's my excuse!

Cal, I repeat what Countess said..."brilliant ideas".

And the others have terrific suggestions, as well.

In fact, I would second the notion to do a domain without hyphens...not for any scientific ideas on my part other than it seems easier to type and/or remember domains without hyphens.

But with Cal's work-around there, you'd be good to go.

Karen

[Henley]

I like CALs idea.

Maybe best to get the full details on how Google thinks about things.

(August 2011 Video) Matt Cutts of Google explains the difference between how Google interprets underscores and dashes in a URL.

[thebaron]

Thanks Henley for the video & cal for an idea and every one who had an input on this.


I don't want to go down the 2 domains route so I will stick with no hypens nor underscores.


Thanks again everyone


Brian