As I discussed in my post on on page SEO factors, using your keywords in your title is one of the ways which search engines can identify what your content is about and rank you accordingly.

Dashes in Domain Names

This is one of those things which you can do very easily in WordPress and it will help to optimize every new post which you make for the search engines without your having to do a thing besides picking a good title featuring your keywords (see how to write a great title) every time you create a new page/post/subdomain.

An important thing to recognize is that hyphens or dashes should be used to separate keywords in a URL because they are recognized by search engines as representing spaces. This happens automatically in WordPress when using the best permalink structure and you can manually title every new subdomain with hyphens if you’re just using HTML.

So /example-this-site appears as “example this site” whereas /dashesindomainnames appears just like that as “dashesindomainnames” or one squished together keyword which search engines will not be able recognize.

Now that we’ve covered the importance of using them in subdomain names, what about dashes in domain names themselves. You’ll notice I don’t use one in between the Converting and the Copy in ConvertingCopy.com.

While there has been some evidence to support the use of keywords in the top level domain name as having a slight influence on SEO, using dashes in domain names adds no SEO benefit to your site whatsoever.

The only thing which using dashes in domain names WILL do for you is to make your URL look awkward and stand out to anyone who visits your site, so focus on just using them in your subdomains and chalk up using dashes in domain names as one of many SEO myths.