interior page format

[josh]

Jeremy,

I remember you saying a while ago that you don't use hyphens in domain names because they aren't good for SEO like they used to be, and I was wondering if you use them on the interior pages? Obviously, with the wealth plan we are typically targeting long tail keywords, and sometimes they are four to five words in length.

It looks strange without any hyphens in the longer keywords, so I was wondering how you worked this. I've also noticed that some well known search engine experts use underscore to separate the words for their interior pages. Which method is best? Hyphens, underscore, or none at all? Thanks a lot.

Regards,

Josh

[Sydney]

Which method is best? Hyphens, underscore, or none at all?

Josh, the answer to this question depends on who you ask. There are 'experts' who advise all three of these ways, so who is right? I don't know. But here is my best estimate:

* I have never used underscores and I never will. My reason is that they're so 'user unfriendly'. Typing along, and then having to use the Shift key to create an underscore, is an annoyance. It's a minor irritant, to be sure, but why make it any harder on our customers?

* I don't use hyphens any more simply because the SEs grow ever more sophisticated. Supposedly Google, at least, has bots that can recognize "threewordstogether" (or more). Given that SEs continually advance, I'm sure this is the way of the future.

* Further, Google has implied that more than one hyphen is suspicious to them. So a site like "auction-genius-course" is, by definition, an attempt to spam the SEs. Of course, in that case, the fact that our site is many years old and has hundreds of pages more than makes up for that detriment. However, in the future, we will have no hyphenated URLs at all unless we're just so desperate for a .com URL that we're forced into it.

You can find some big-name experts to disagree with the above, I'm sure. However, that's what we do based on our experience.

Hope that helps.

[Techie]

Sydney sums up what we do. :-) You have to make the call yourself but we aren't big believers in hyphens. Back in 2000 and such it was common but now we just avoid them.

[gtrusler]

For what it's worth, I know some of the big blogging platforms name their pages using hyphens. I like hyphens because they make your page names a little more readable in the search engine results.

bestchildrenscoughmedcine.htm

vs.

best-childrens-cough-medicine.htm

I agree with Sydney - the underscores are a pain to type, so I never use them.

[josh]

Thanks everyone for your help,

Sydney, that makes perfect sense; my first sites with the wealth plan I had been using regular hyphens, but now I'm simply typing in the name of the page without any. I know it's a little less readable, but if that's what the SE's want, that's what I'll do. Thanks a lot.

Regards,

Josh