Hyphens - As Bad as Advertised?

[trivum]

I know as a general principle many people say stay away from hyphens, but if there are two really good words for a market, do hyphenated names sell ok? Anyone with experience dealing in hyphens?

 

[WealthStream]

Depends on how you plan to market the site. It's probably not a good idea to use hyphens if you are going mostly for typeins and branding, unless you can successfully integrate the hyphen into your brand (which is very difficult to do).

If you're planning on promoting the site primarily through SEO, however, hyphens are fine. They may even help your ranking in some of the smaller, less advanced search engines (probably not in Google though).

 

[aldwin]

If you choose a domain with an hyphen, be prepared to lose traffic to the non-hyphenated version

 

[hanz]

If you are planning to do your own website on that domain then it is OK, but it is very hard to sell domain with hyphen

 

[monRa]

hyphen aren't so good, in which site you think you have gone:
in flash-games or flashgames in 2 of course, right?

 

[harkster]

Here is a case were I feel the hyphen would be prefered. T-shirt(s) has nearly twice the WT daily numbers over tshirt(s). While it would be nice to have both I feel that the hyphen would be prefered because of the SE's. While looking at this I picked up a couple hyphenated 2 word t-shirt names.

Here is a direct exampled for development. You ain't going to get much in the way of type-ins cause of extension. Taking into account the reg fees which would YOU develop. Poker-Gifts.ws or PokerGifts.cc. Don't trash the extensionjs as the development will be looking for SE traffic and hoping to get return traffic

A hyphen real world example --

I own all-pottery.com which I haven't worked on in quite some time. The stats for this month are as follows.
483 uniques , 543 visits
Direct address / Bookmarks 46.1%
Links from an Internet Search Engine 6.3%
Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines) 47.2%

Another site - no hyphen, The stats for this month are as follows.
2330 uniques , 3305 visits
Direct address / Bookmarks 50.9%
Links from an Internet Search Engine 38,9%
Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines) 9.9%


IMHO when you get into the development world all bets are off & it depends on how the site is promoted.

 

[Grrilla]

Tx for the real life example, Hark. Always like seeing those.

Hyphens are also being discussed in this current thread:

http://www.namepros.com/showthread.php?t=112167