Though the Shakespearean reference in the title may seem a little out of place when you’re talking about creating an affiliate website, when it comes to the subject of keywords and site names then it’s more apt than you think. Having to choose how to present your hard fought-for keywords and choosing whether to dash, underscore or leave them as is can inspire in some indecision on a level that Hamlet himself would be proud of. There is a constant argument raging around this whole issue, and it’s not just the address of your site that will need to be scrutinised but also the names of your individual page titles that will have you gnashing your teeth, especially if your decide to trawl through the thoroughly treacherous and numerous forums on the web. To save you the hassle of doing this, we have put together a few tips about keyword use in both domain names and page titles that should help clear things up a little bit.

Dash the Site Name?
There are many domain names out there with rich, profitable keywords that have yet to be tapped, but a question that comes up again and again is whether it is better to go for two words run together, for example redclothes.com, or to separate the two with a dash, e.g. red-clothes.com. The short answer is that you should almost always make sure that you set up your main site with the two words running together as not only does this look more professional and make your site look like an original idea, but if you’re going to be using more than two words the argument for getting rid of the dashes is even stronger. We have all seen the www.here-is-another-site-with-loads-of-keywords-stuffed-into-the-domain.com type examples – although rarely high up in the results pages!

The slightly longer answer is that you will however need to consider things a little more deeply if your site is going to have two keywords in the domain name which when side by side form an ambiguous third word which can easily confuse – or even offend! An obvious example would be something like experts-exchange.com, in which the dash removes any sense of ambiguity and the potentially confusing sexual connotations of the unhyphenated domain name.

Dash the Page Name?
There are a couple of major considerations in naming pages. Firstly, remember that the page name is part of a longer URL and avoid excessive repetition. Say you had opted for ladders-expo.com (to avoid the dodgier connotations of the non-dashed version), you probably want to avoid URLs such as www.ladders-expo.com/ladders/ladders-for-sale.html as these may be counter-productive. Whilst keyword-in-URL is still seemingly a significant factor with Google (some would argue too much so), overdoing anything in SEO terms is never a good strategy. Thus when naming folders and pages, think about the whole of the URL rather than just one element. A better URL could be www.ladders-expo.com/aluminium/6ft-folding-ladder.html. This is more meaningful and less keyword-stuffed than the previous version.

Secondly, whereas combining names results in URLs that are easier to recall when visitors type them directly into the address bar, the inverse is true for page names. Almost no-one will type in a full page name into the address bar so page names should be as descriptive and as search engine friendly as possible. If you think about it from a programming point of view, it is going to be far easier for a search engine to parse (read and break down into its constituent components) a dashed URL – the dashes “tell” the search engine where the boundaries of each word are. Otherwise the poor thing has to (and may not bother to) perform a dictionary look-up for every possible grouping of characters within the page name in order to determine the constituent words and, as we have seen above, this can in some cases be ambiguous.

Let’s assume for a moment that you have a riveting page demonstrating the capabilities of some ladders, perhaps using some videos. You could send the search engine robots into a spin by calling the page findemosnow.html. Possible interpretations of this are:-

fin + demo + snow (something about demonstrating fins in the snow?)
fin + demos + now (something about demonstrating fins right now)
find + demos + now (which is what you intended – but you may be lucky to get there)

OK, a bit of a daft example but it does illustrate the point: find-demos-now.html should eradicate any confusion. For those of you who prefer to avoid dashes at all costs, you may be able to create a folder structure which will include all of the elements needed e.g. /find/demos/now.html

Dash or Underscore
When it comes to giving titles to the individual names of your pages the choice of separator until recently was clear, as Google did not recognise the lowly underscore as separating two keywords because of its use in various scripting and programming applications. Thus, historically the best option for everyone was to stick to using the dash in order to separate keywords in a page title. However, the busy beavers at Google have rectified this issue and now both dashes and underscores in page titles are given the same value, so from an SEO point of view, theoretically either a dash or an underscore is going to result in the same thing. However, things aren’t as black and white as this, because of course you’ve got to take into account the fact that the average consumer is going to be far more comfortable with typing in a dash rather than an underscore on the rare occasions on which they may be entering an entire page name. As a result, the general consensus is that when deciding upon the name of a page it’s best still to use dashes if you have SEO in mind, at least until trends in searching change and the underscore is higher up in the mainstream typing psyche.

The Third Way
There is of course another way to approach this problem and cover all of your bases, if you’ll excuse the overused baseball metaphor. If you’re fretting over whether to buy the dashed or non-dashed version of your domain name then why not just buy both? This will allow you to develop one domain as your main site with all of your content, then simply 301 redirect (the safe way) the second domain to your main site. Not only will this cover the dash or no dash problem, but it will stop anyone else buying the other domain name and leeching from your traffic.

Ultimately, different people have expressed different opinions on the question as to whether adding a dash to your domain name choice will help or hinder when it comes to SEO, but in general it’s probably most sensible to stay away from the dash, unless it is necessary to clarify the keywords which might otherwise be confusing. And domain names can be bought for a relatively small amount so there shouldn’t be too much of a problem with buying both domains and removing the debate entirely.

As for page naming, all but the simplest single word page names will generally benefit from dashes to make interpretation and keyword identification as easy as possible. If you are in any doubt as to which way to go, take a look at a good cross-section of sites ranking for your target terms and see what approach they have taken. Whilst we all know that there are a ton of other factors which will affect their rankings, you may find that there are some common themes.

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