Why Punctuation Matters: Dashes vs. Underscores in Your Site’s URL

When building a new site from scratch or optimizing an existing one, webmasters face numerous decisions regarding many small details in SEO. It is no wonder that some of those details may be overlooked, such as the use of dashes and underscores in URL structures. Many new website owners have asked—and still do ask—why such a minute detail matters in SEO. The answer is very simple: Google looks at dashes and underscores differently.

Underscores are Joiners, Dashes are Separators

Google treats underscores as a joiner between two keywords, whereas a dash (also called a hyphen) signifies a separation of the keywords. For example, to Google, blue_shoes is just that: blue_shoes. In comparison, Google reads blue-shoes as blue shoes.

Therefore, if your URL contains “blue_shoes,” Google will only supply that page if the user searches for “blue_shoes”—which is very unlikely. If your URL contains “blue-shoes,” that page can be returned for the searches “blue,” “shoes,” as well as “blue shoes.″

This differentiation between the punctuation, according to Google’s head of webspam Matt Cutts, is a remnant from Google’s early days. Since Google’s original engineers were “techy” computer programmers, they were very focused on being able to find specific terms within the code. Using underscores made it much easier to find those files or macros within programming language. The practice eventually carried over and evolved with Google’s search algorithm. Treating underscores as joiners is still in use with Google’s latest update Hummingbird, and Cutts said that the company had no plans in the foreseeable future to change how the search engine viewed them.

The True Impact on Search Results

Although the difference between the two punctuation marks is great, Cutts explained that using dashes instead of underscores in URLs “doesn’t make that much of a difference” in relation to Google search results. It is a “second order effect” rather than a primary one.

Consider Wikipedia: the website comprises millions of URLs that contain only underscores and no dashes. But that does not affect Wikipedia’s ranking, considering that the website obviously does very well with the many other signals Google uses in determining SERPs.

Apart from Google, Microsoft’s search engine Bing does not differentiate at all between underscores and dashes as of August 2011. They are both viewed as separators.

What Webmasters Are Advised to Do

If you already have a website that utilizes underscores in its URL structures, Cutts said it may not be worth the time and effort to rewrite all of them to include hyphens and create 301 redirects if the website is already ranking well due to other factors. Changing all of your website’s URLs could, in fact, create more problems than just sticking with the underscores. However, if you’re starting fresh and don’t yet have a foothold in search rankings, use dashes between keywords in all of your URLs.

From a user point of view, dashes also have greater visibility and usability. Underscores can be hidden by the link itself and appear as spaces, thus confusing the visitor. Consider these two URLs:

The underscore disappears into the underlined text, making it difficult for users to decipher the real URL and possibly link back to the website.

Our Take on It

According to Google, dashes do trump underscores as the URL punctuation of choice. Matt Cutts’ video explained the difference between the two—which turns out is fairly great—but said that the effect of using underscores over dashes is relatively minor in search results.

That does mean that there is an effect. Imagine if Google proclaimed that all websites should unequivocally use dashes instead of underscores and that using the latter is detrimental. Cutts could have instructed website owners to change at least their top 100 pages, but that may have (and probably would have) caused chaos. Instead, Cutts assured the SEO industry that underscores are still OK.

Still, even if you have an established website, it might be worth it to actually rewrite your top 100 pages’ URLs if they utilize underscores. Google has come out in favor of the dash, although according to Cutts, they don’t influence much. But it could turn out, however, that using underscores has a greater impact than we know.

By Anca Bradley

More from Fruition:

1. Google vs Bing! – Google Sets the Trap – Bing! Gets Honey All Over its Face
2. Does Your Site Need Optimizing?
3. Google Freshness Update: What is it?

Quick and Dirty Overview of SEO for Beginners

 Here is a surface review of how search engines work and what they mean to your website traffic; website traffic and SEO will be defined.

Then, we will cover a few basic SEO techniques.

Let’s jump right in.

How Does a Search Engine Work?

Search engines like Google or Bing do two things—crawl the web and build indexes.

Their purpose is to provide users with answers by calculating relevancy, then serving their results.

A search engine does this by employing automated robots called “crawlers” or “spiders” that find documents and web pages through links.

These search engines are comprised of huge servers, so big they need their own buildings called data centers. These hard drives must be massive so they can store billions upon billions of web pages to be recalled later.

Speed is also a huge factor in the competitive world of search engines. Another reason why there are many of these data centers globally.

The relevancy of each web page is ranked along with its importance.

How is “Importance” Determined?

These days, importance is primarily measured by the major search engines based on a site, web page, or document’s popularity. Those getting the most visitors must be providing something useful—that’s the thinking here.

Search ranking results are not calculated by humans. Instead, mathematical equations called algorithms do the work. The algorithms use not only popularity and relevance, but hundreds of other traits called “ranking factors.”

One ranking factor that you hear website owners talking about is “traffic,” or “website traffic.”

Website traffic is defined as the number of visitors and visits your website receives. Higher numbers of traffic to your website helps it rank higher, because the search engines factor higher traffic levels as a sign of relevance and popularity.

Search engines can play a big role in how much traffic your website experiences over time. That’s because where your website ends up in SERPs, or Search Engine Results Pages, greatly influences how many people click to your site. If you site ranks on the first page of search results, in the top ten, people are 42% more likely to click the link to your site. On the other hand, if your website ranks on the tenth page of search results, there is only a 3% likelihood that a searcher will end up clicking to your site.

A Ranking Factor You Can Control

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a strategy to help your URL rank higher in search engines like Google. There is a lot we could cover about SEO, but for right now, we will give a beginner’s lesson in SEO basics.

Defining SEO

According to webopedia dot com, Search Engine Optimization “is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP) — including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.”

SEO is important, because it helps the robots from search engines to “see” and understand your website more clearly, which enables them to understand the purpose and usefulness of your website.

Before you go about hiring an expensive SEO firm to help your business website rank better in searches, there are a few simple and no cost SEO techniques you can do right away.

Let’s look at a few of these…

1. Use Google’s Keyword tool – This free tool analyzes your website’s content, then suggests keywords for you to implement into your website content. Plus, it points out negative keywords that can turn off your target audience. You should include a lookover of your competition’s keywords and monthly keywords searches both locally and globally to help you find the right keywords.

2. Place those keywords into your content – What’s called “keyword density” is highly important in relation to your search engine rankings. But don’t get tempted to “stuff” your web pages with keywords. This is now an SEO faux pas that will only hurt your search rankings, as Google Penguin now punishes websites that practice “keyword stuffing” with lower search rankings. Much lower.

3. Build a Foundation of Backlinks – The most challenging of the three steps is also the most important. Search engine algorithms place a high level of importance on the number of backlinks pointing to your website.

Backlinks are considered social proof that people are sharing and talking about your website content. This causes the search robots to consider your site as high quality. Plus, another beautiful aspect to backlinks is that they bring in more leads back to your website, thus leading to more conversions.

Another basic way to optimize your website is to play tag.

No, not literally. We are talking about writing search engine optimized…

Title Tags and Meta Tags

Title tags and meta tags look like this: <meta> tags and <title> tags. You place your descriptions in between the < and > where the HTML coding is found.

These are used by the search engines to get a description of what you have on each page for indexing. Writing effective title and meta tags will help improve your SEO.

The <title> tag is the line of text that appears at the top of your browser window. They need to always reflect the correct content on that page—whether a product page, blog or photo.

Keep the title predictable and make sure it describes your website so it would meet your users expectations. If it doesn’t, your search ranking will get dinged by Google.

The <meta> tag is utilized by Google and other search engines to provide a brief description to the viewer of what information is waiting on that page to be read.

Meta tags, also called meta descriptions, are still important and can help your SEO.

Here is an example of a search result with a meta description:

Here is an example of a search result without a meta description:

You can see how the meta description gives you a better idea of what you will find if you take the time to click that link.

A search link without a meta description, like this one above, will instead display the first 160 or so characters of the article or web page. Normally, that will not provide a strong meta description, thus making the link less likely to be clicked.

Remember to shoot for a 160 character length. That is the limit for Google. Yahoo does show a bit longer meta descriptions, but more people use Google, so shoot for the 160 character limit.

Now that you know how the meta tags show up on search engine results pages, you will want to write clear, concise and compelling descriptions. Please note that if you have similar pages of content, don’t copy and paste the <meta> tags as you will likely get dinged for duplicate content or for unoriginality. So, just as you want your content to be original and unique, treat your meta tags the same way.

Closing Out with a Bang

Start getting more traffic to your website by using these awesomesauce tips on writing stellar meta descriptions, and then study how they affect your website traffic. Here’s what you can do:

1. Write relevant descriptions that present the core message and purpose of each web page
2. Emphasize a reason for reading. Special offers, urgent deadlines, or secret discoveries are examples
3. Use words that are solid and specific. Avoid clichés like “innovative” or “world class”
4. Don’t write to the length limit. Keep it concise, yet compelling

You can always tweak or change meta descriptions at any time.

Experiment to find what works for your website.

If you need help making sure your title tags or meta tags are the right length, a great place to check each one is at a straightforward web page called Check Your Title Tag and Meta Description Length.

Chapter from This Book; Build a Website 101

SEO: What is it and how does it work?

Nowadays there are more and more websites being created, making it harder for your target audience to find your site easily, but this is why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is important. Thankfully search engines have become so accurate that more than 90% of us use them to find what we want instead of just browsing around. We all know that, depending on the keywords we type, search engines return a list of sites sorted by relevance. Now, 89% of us only click results displayed on the 1st page. If what we are looking for is not there, we just readjust the keywords to perform a new search. Even more interesting, 77% of clicks happen on the top 3 results (usually, right before the page fold and not taking any ads into account). Another curious stat? The 1st result will get clicked on over 53% of the time. Impressive, huh?

So, what exactly is SEO?

SEO helps search engines (think Google, Yahoo, Bing) determine what a site is all about. It defines the rank any website gets when competing with other sites and, those who use the available techniques the best, receive the benefit of visibility and quality traffic. Keep in mind, although each search engine has its own top secret algorithm that changes constantly, the concepts below apply to them all.

What are the ranking factors?

In order to list the sites by relevance, search engines use ranking factors to establish their preferred sites. These determine which site is displayed before the rest. And no page will rank high if it doesn’t have several SEO techniques in place. Sure, the content might be amazing, but if it hasn’t been updated in ages chances are it’ll be at the bottom of the list.

Onsite
Onsite are those that happen on the site itself and can therefore be controlled entirely.
Ensuring the proper keywords are employed. Updating the site regularly with relevant content. Adding new pages with the targeted keywords. Adding internal links (within the site itself). Optimising the HTML code. Removing barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Offsite Offsite are those that are not directly related to the site and thus are outside the websites admin’s control. Working to create backlinks from other established and relevant sites. Building social media profiles. Optimising video posts. Posting answers on Q&A forums. Commenting on related sites and blogs.

Commonly used techniques in detail

Keywords are the key

For any page to rank, the right keywords must be used in the content and HTML. This is how search engines can deliver web traffic to suitable pages. And we are not just talking quantity but, more importantly, quality.

Content is king 

What boosts page ranking?
Having quality content,
using the right keywords,
 adding more pages,
 optimising your HTML code,
getting backlinks and being
an active member of
social media sites.

Although it might sound obvious, the SEO foundation is good and relevant content. If all other factors are in place but people are not interested in the shared content, all efforts are in vain. By producing quality content and adding real value, people are inclined to remain on pages and not jump to other sites. This is what makes a site useful and unique.

Fresh content

Content is crucial but keeping it updated is just as important. Search engines can pick up any changes made to a website. So, if these changes are frequent, involve the creation of new pages or impact important areas of the site, these are likely to improve site visibility.

HTML code optimisation

Search engines read the underlying HTML code on all websites to determine the site structure . Although this is not an extensive list, here are some of them:

• Title tag: Descriptive page titles are search engine favorites, specially if they are heavily related to the content of the page and the keywords.
• Header tags: When content has the right structure it is most likely to be picked up by a search engine. This is where headers (h1, h2, etc.) come in place. This helps search engines understand the key sections of a web page.
• Image alt attribute: Search engines can’t see images as we do, so the words used within this attribute should be text equivalent of what the image is trying to convey.

Breadcrumbs

Sure, breadcrumbs allow users to navigate the site easily, but they also help search engines to determine the structure of a site.

XML sitemaps

These sitemaps provide the URLs of the pages the make the structure of the site. These are favourites among search engines since they are a standard machine readable format.

Short page links

Most pages use friendly URLs not only to appeal to users but also because of SEO. Search engines are more likely to go for pages with shorter and descriptive URLs over other relevant results with longer and less descriptive links.

Backlinks

Important people are measured by the amount of people who look up to them, right? Well, search engines apply this concept by counting the links to a website from other sites to establish the trustworthiness of it. Yet, not all links are counted equally. If a backlink comes from a respected site then it’s considered better and thus gives more points to the website getting that link back.

Social media

Just as it happens with links, getting shares in social media sites improves SEO. This is why any site should consider having a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a LinkedIn profile or even better, all of them. And just as I mentioned before, freshness matters. It’s not just setting up a profile, it’s the interaction with others that improve visibility.