SEO School: Dashes not Underscores

Since you can’t use spaces in URL text, words tend to be separated by either dashes (-) or underscores (_). But does it matter which you use?

The simple answer is, yes it does, and here’s why…

The main reason is that the Google algorithm recognises some punctuation points but not all of them, the ones it doesn’t recognise are simply treated as spaces. Underscores fall into the category of characters they do recognise. Therefore, if you have something like Dog_Food in your URL, Google will treat that as all one word, which means there’s no way that URL is coming up as a result in a Google search unless someone actually types in ‘Dog_Food.’ How many times a day do you imagine that happens?

If you have Dog-Food in your URL Google recognises that phrase as simply ‘Dog Food,’ which means that the term is eligible to come up for a whole range of searches, like ‘Dog,’ ‘Food,’ and even stuff like ‘Food for my Dog.’ 

When you look at it like this, a small detail like using one piece of punctuation instead of another starts to seem very important indeed, doesn’t it?

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1. Use of Symbols on Adwords (Part 1)
2. How to succeed with SEO marketing
3. Web Design School: Tips for Writing good Web Copy