Choosing Domain Names

Title: Choosing Domain Names - Hyphens or Not?
Author: Daniel Moro

Article:Choosing a good domain name is one of most important steps insetting up your online business, but it's getting harder andharder to find good names that are still available.

You coulduse a domain name with hyphens, but is that really a good idea? Let's quickly review what makes a good domain name.

A domainname needs to be relevant, easy to remember, keyword optimized,and free from trademark conflicts. It should also be shorter.Although seven characters or less is ideal, you may have tosettle for a domain name that's a little longer.

So you've just set up your new barbecue grills business and nowyou discover that barbecuegrills.com is already taken. Shouldyou consider hyphenating the domain name to barbecue-grills.comor should you go back to the drawing board? The first choice should always be to take the name without ahyphen. Having established that, there are some exceptions.Let's look at hyphenated domain names and when they are might begood to use. Domains with hyphens can sometimes be a good idea if you reallywant certain words in your domain name but all the domainswithout hyphens are already taken. Another reason to use a hyphen is when the words you plan to useare harder to read without the hyphen. The domain hotellamps.comis harder to read than hotel-lamps.com.

That is not necessarilya great domain name but it does serve to illustrate the pointthat some domains are easier to read with a hyphen. You might also consider using hyphens for search engineoptimization. Some people suggest that using hyphens helps thesearch engines to distinguish your keywords better.

This may bea good option for webmasters whose primary goal is to optimizetheir sites for traffic from natural search engine rankings.

Theonly catch here is that this could change over time since searchengines are constantly adjusting their search algorithms. Incidentally, if you decide not to use hyphens in your domainname, watch out for any unintended double meanings that might beembarrassing. To illustrate this point a couple of fairlysuspicious domain names are therapistfinder.com andmolestationnursery.com

In case you are wondering the latter wasreportedly the domain for the Mole Station Native Nursery basedin New South Wales, Australia, although it seems, fortunately,to have moved.

Whatever reason you have for using a hyphen in your domain name,it would be good to remember one thing. Some people will forgetthe hyphen when they type your domain name. So whenever youinvest in promoting your site, some lucky webmaster who owns theun-hyphenated version of your domain is going to get some freetraffic, courtesy of your hard work. As you can see, there are some situations when using a hyphen inyour domain name may be a good decision.