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Read This BEFORE You Optimize Your Website For The Search Engines

If you register a domain name that isn’t as effective as it could be, you’ll be kicking yourself when you see this simple distinction. It’ll save you tons of time, and aggravation.

One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of websites, or actually the urls (domain names) for those websites, have not taken advantage of the way they are viewed by search engines. Each search engine will of course have its own specific techniques for deciding how it ranks each website, and there are many more tips to move your website up, but I like this one because it's pretty easy, and effective.

The trick is to use hyphens in the domain name of your website. That way, for example, the url for website, http://www.internetdiscountshoppingmall.com becomes http://www-internet-discount-shopping-mall.com. The search engines may be smart enough to find http://www.internetdiscountshoppingmall.com on their own, but why leave it to chance. The hyphens break up the url into sensible words, not a bunch of strung-together, potentially meaningless words.

I use a hyphenated url for all my online marketing, and use the un-hyphenated url for podcasting, business cards, and word-of-mouth advertising. While the hyphens improve my search engine rankings, with them, the url is a mouthful. It takes too long to say and too long to copy down.

Try this for your domain name. You may see a decent improvement in your search engine rankings. Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, HotBot, Ask.com and MSN may all put your name just that much higher in their rankings. Just try to do it before you get to deep into an already existing website. I unfortunately learned this technique too late, and spent hours re-configuring page after page to work with the hyphenated url. But I think it’s worth it.