Thread: Which is better--a .net name or a hyphenated name?

I own a few domain names, and I am thinking about starting a website and business—a document editing and proofreading business. I need some help choosing which domain I want to use from among the domains I own.

My options are:

editing-proofreadingservices.com

or

editingproofreadingservices.net.

The domain name “editingproofreadingservices.com” is not available, so I am trying to decide if it is better use the words with a “dash” and .com, or no dash and .net--in terms of the best option for SEO? For the purpose of this example, first answer this question without factoring in the difficulty of saying the domain name verbally with a dash, or other marketing concerns, because I am going to forward another business name address to my site anyway, which I will use on my business cards and when I speak to people over the phone. So which option do you think is better for SEO?

Then, please consider marketing concerns and if I am going to use the name verbally and on business cards and answer the question according to those concerns.

Thank you very much.

Verbally, I think its clear which one you'd rather say to someone and which one is not as good (the dashed one).

SEO wise a .com and .net have the same weight and you have the benefit of exact domain match with the .net, so the .net would be preferable.

i prefer keyword on domain without hyphenated, and it must be .com ,if it's not available then i choose .net then .org

from my experience hypen or not, it doesn't matter. SE will still recognize it as a keyword

.Net have same valuable as .com have do not go for hyphen,

Domain name is just one factor which have not more than 1% value in ranking....

You'll always get one plonker that will write:

editingDASHproofreadingservices.com

So go for the .net.

Originally Posted by JudderMan

You'll always get one plonker that will write:

editingDASHproofreadingservices.com

So go for the .net.

That's funny.

Yeah, I agree. Go for the .net.

I have several .net website that rank as well as any of my .com sites. I also have had hyphenated domain names that were VERY hard to SEO and I avoid them completely now. Go with the .net domain name.

I never had any trouble getting PR or first page results with hyphenated domains. One of my blogs gets 500 - 1500 visitors per day and has overall site PR1...with a hyphenated domain name and I didn't put ANY SEO effort into it. It all came from semi automated content added every day (freetrafficsystem.com, a free service and highly recommended for getting free quality content and lots of backlinks).

For SEO it doesn't matter as far as I've experienced. Ofcourse if you find a .net without hypen I would go for that as well.

Andre

Matt Cutts once said they prefer hyphenated urls than haing sites that use underscores for page names. (www.my_site.com\ vs www.my-site.com). Using hyphens or not does not impact SEO at all. It's an easy way for people to read your site name, and hence remember your site, if they want to tell someone else about it.