Your SEO is shit

So, we’ve had a lovely question come in from Jill Wailin, she asks:

‘If you’re so good at SEO why have you got hyphens and stop words in your URL?’

Ok, so first of all lets explore why she’s asking us this question.

Most SEOs might consider that hyphens in a URL are a Bad Thing because there’s been indication from some Search Engines that too may hyphens are a sign that the site isn’t really very good.

Some SEOs might consider that having Stop Words in the URL are bad because they .. oh dear… ‘dilute the keyphrase density’ of the URL, gosh, such poncy language. All theyre suggesting is that if you want to rank for a particular term you should use it in your domain.

Nonsense on both counts

Choosing a domain name is immensely important, but there’s actually very little SEO in the decision. The hyphens / keyphrase arguments are completely moot and is easily disprovable with many examples.

Choosing a domain name

So, http://www.your-seo-is-shit.com would be a terrible domain name if you were targeting it at normal people, or having to explain it over the telephone ‘the hyphen is at the top right of the keyboard, yes that’s it, no you don’t need to press shift, yes, yes it’s just like a minus sign’ or were expecting less able users to have to enter it. We’re not, and we dont care. We also don’t really give a shit about the length of the domain we’re using. There are lots of reasons to try and use the shortest domain as you can, and that’s all fine.

But not a lot of this is an SEO decision, may be it falls more into branding and usability? Luckily, the good SEOs these days are able to advise on both branding and usability as well as SEO.

A big thing to watch is to make sure you’re only running one version of your site. Some people run two without even knowing it, this is called, guugh, the canonical problem, which mostly jsut means your site is available on the www and non-www version. It’s easy to fix with a bit of redirecty stuff, just pick either the non-www or the www and redirect one to the other. Go check your site now, type in http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com and see what happens – getting your content delivered on both? That’s not great.

Yes, by conventional thinking, our domain name might be shit but:

• It made us laugh
• It’s fairly memorable
• We don’t care what anyone thinks
• The audience we’re aiming at isn’t a conventional audience
• The structure of any URL has little to no ranking factor

Do you REALLY think a couple of hyphens in a domain name is gonna stop Google indexing a site?

It’s not 1998 anymore. Grow up.

SEO-001