Quick question on domain names for seo..

keyword : how to sell gold

howtosellgold.com .net etc.. taken

how much does putting hyphens in affect the seo?

for example howto-sellgold.com ? or how-to-sell-gold.com

Ps. that keyword is one I made up

I'd prefer not using much hyphens in the domain. If necessary (if other tld are taken) I'd go for maximum one hyphen. Many hyphens make the domain name look spammy. Even if you achieve #1 you might get less click through rate to your site just because the domain looks unusual. Remember, SERP too is kind of sales page (or optin as you say). Better solution is to load up Adwords Tool, get a related keyword with comparable search volume and then mashup those keywords so that it contains both of them (don't make it look spammy) and it becomes easy to rank for both of them.

Dont go for hypens.

First of all, they dont affect much for SEO, but they will hurt your visitor rate.

You will get less people clicking on it.

Also , they dont affect seo at the moment, but you never know what might happen down the road.

So if its taken, do something like that. howtosellgold247.com or even howtosellgoldv.com

When adding a letter to the end of "keywords" I have found that if I use a letter that normally would not fit there works better then one that does.

So howtosellgoldv.com is better then howtosellgolds.com

But that is just my opinion. It seems to me like that, but have not done extensive testing.

Do not use that thing, those things make me sick. :vroam:

Do not use hyphens. It puts you at a disadvantage.