Question: One of our execs insists we hyphenate our most important keywords. Example: “super-quiet generators.” Will this hurt our ranking in organic search results?

Answer: No. In fact, hyphens may help your search results, says Jeff Jones, Web optimization specialist for Lyris, Inc., an online marketing company.

Search engines treat hyphens as word separators. They make no distinction between hyphenated words and words separated by spaces.

So “super-quiet” is like using two words separated by a space.

Example: If a user types in “super-quiet generators,” the search engine will perform a multiple word search for all three terms.

So URLs made up of multiple important keywords that are separated by hyphens usually rank higher in search results than URLs made up of one word with no separators, says Jones.

Another example: “www.high-power.com” will rank higher in search results than “www.highpower.com” because the search engine will recognize “high” and “power” as separate terms.

When it comes to the Web site “www.highpower.com,” the search engine will only see one word, “highpower,” which doesn’t really exist.

Tags: Ask the experts, Jeff Jones, Lyris, search engine, URL, Web optimization