Matt Cutts :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is something I keep reminding myself I need to learn more about. I’ve got some of it worked out and have found invaluable the free, downloadable guide Google released some time ago – Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. But to improve my knowledge and hopefully the findability of my blogs, I’m embarking on some self-education. So my plan is to focus on something about SEO once a week, at the beginning of the weekend, and report here in a series which I am grandly titling SEO Saturday.

Today I’m looking at the question of whether hyphens or dashes in URLs are better than underscores. As the title of this post declares, it seems that the verdict is no contest in favor of hyphens.

Why would this question concern me?

Well, having spent about half an hour today trying to find a good domain name for a new project and discovering the top level, dot com version of each name I picked was not available, I got to thinking about using a hyphenated (i.e. with a dash or dashes) domain name, just as an SEO expert colleague of mine does regularly. In the particular instance this would make quite good sense, because each of the dot com names I looked at was parked, that is it was not being used for a “real live” website or blog. So I would not, on the face of it, be competing with someone active in the same market space with a live site and the same site name.

And indeed the dot com domain version of the ideal name I wanted for the new site proved to be available in the hyphenated version.

Maybe it was time to get over my prejudice in favor of “continuous” domain names and get into the hyphenated variety?

Then, no doubt because I was thinking about all this, I noticed in my FriendFeed stream a video by Google searchmeister Matt Cutts about hyphenated versus underscored URLs. Not that I’d been thinking about using underscores, but the video was brief and I found it very interesting for the implicit insight it gave into how the people behind the scenes at Google think and work.

Verdict on the particular question? Google’s machines read hyphens in URLs as separators, i.e. indicating separate words and thus, Matt indicates, hyphens are better than underscores. At least, better for now. He acknowledges that they might change the algorithm one day.

The next question is: given the choice between a hyphenated dot com name and a non-hyphenated, “wholeword” dot net, or dot org or other alternative to dot com, which is better?

I’ve done a bit of searching online but don’t know what the “right” answer is to that, although there does appear to be a consensus of “one hyphen good, two or more hyphens bad”.

Advice and comments welcome.

: Image by Randy Stewart via Flickr

I admit it. Keeping email under control is not my long suit. I know it’s important and I have listened attentively while experts told me how to manage it, but I have not had great success in applying the theory.

Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact that I am not one of those people who always has everything in order. Every now and again I blitz my intray and general desk area so that I know where things are and am able to work more effectively. But as for following a really ordered system, I don’t score highly.

I’ve given up envying the naturally – or trained to be – orderly people who, if you believe them, never have a piece of paper or any other item out of place.

And the days when I had a secretary to do this sort of thing for me are long gone.

But I still need to do something about the email “pile”.

Which was why I was very pleased to see in my RSS feed today a link to the post by Matt Cutts from Google on how to Start the Year with an Empty Inbox.

This is in the “not necessarily the most efficient in the long term, but fast and painless” category. Basically, Matt shows us how, in three easy steps, we can archive our current Gmail inbox contents (for me it was mostly stuff I know I will never get around to reading) but archiving it in such a way as to be able to find it all again in an “oldinbox”, work on individual items as we choose – and even, if the loss of our inbox contents grieves us, to undo the whole process.

I’ve used a similar process with my Outlook mailbox, for quite a while now.

Sneaky trick it may be and I’m sure it’s not in any “How to Manage Your Email” course, but it works for me.

And re-visiting my Gmail inbox just now, a couple of hours after clearing it, I saw just one item, which I did not need, and got great satisfaction from deleting it. Now the game will be to keep the inbox clear. I know that I will have to check out and deal with a number of items in the “oldinbox”, but I can’t see that being a problem.

Feels good.