Better URLs: Hyphens Are Your Site’s Best Friend
When you are working with SEO it is important to not only take note on what is going on in the website’s content and code, but you also need to look at the URLs. People often do special tricks to get things listed (especially with blogs and other dynamic sites) but what about regular old static web pages on information site? Well, word separation of course! You will see tons of optimized sites across the internet using hyphens and underscores to separate the names of their individual pages. Both are used prevalently, but which ones should you be using to help with your site?
To answer that question head over to Google and type in “sleep therapy”. Now open a new window and search “sleep_therapy” with an underscore and in a third one search for “sleep-therapy” hyphenated. Notice the difference? Google sure does! While in the search with the underscore (_) we find results that only contain our search term as it is, the search with the hyphen (-) returned results as if the hyphen wasn’t even there.
So how does this help with SEO, you ask? It has a wide range of possibilities mostly with keyword-rich URLs in your links like “http://mydomain.com/small-business-internet-solutions.html”. Everyone knows more keywords within your website = more relevant content = better overall ranking.
So the next time you are making a new_page.html, consider making it a new-page.html.