A lot of people buy domains with dashes and some people swear they won’t touch a domain with dashes in it.  Are domains with dashes any good?  Do they hurt SEO?

The search engines do rank sites with dashes, but you might end up in the google sandbox for a bit because a lot of spammers, scammers, and just all about shady characters use domains with dashes because the regular one isn’t available or they can make it look like they are the normal domain to steal their traffic.

The keywords are viewed by the search engines and you can definitely be ranked for your keywords using domains with dashes and they are definitely a good alternative if you can’t find a decent domain extension with your keywords or decent domain alternative.

Personally I rarely buy domains with dashes because I like people to remember my site.  People forget to add dashes and end up on other sites.  I want them to get to my site the easiest way possible.  Dashes make a domain name harder to remember and you have to be careful when using them.

I have bought dashed domains and used them to quickly get ranked for my chosen keywords but I don’t like them and try to avoid them as much as possible.

The domain name you choose for your business or website is extremely important.  How easy it is to spell, remember, etc…  For search engines the single most important thing about your domain name is that you have your keywords within your domain.  If you own a barber shop in Brick, NJ and you buy/own brickbarbershop.com (buy the way this domain is available as of this posting), you better believe the search engines are going to give you a top priority when it comes to ranking.  If there is a lot of competition you might not be number one at first, but with a few backlinks you should be on the first page for most long tail keywords.  A good domain name can rise to be number one with very few backlinks, the search engines give a lot of power to keyword rich domain names.  The most important thing is to make sure you get your site indexed, build up a few backlinks and see where you land in the rankings.

You don’t necessarily have to have your keywords inside of your domain name, you could always make it a brandable domain name.  Look at Yahoo, Google, those are easy to remember brandable domain names.  The thing with brandable domain names is you won’t get the instant authority the search engines give you for having a keyword rich domain.  With brandable domains you have to go out there and get backlinks and add decent content to get your sight up in the SERPs, it’s a little more work than a descriptive domain, but it can be worth it.