Is it better for traffic to separate words in your titles?

1. 60

   MRdivmanposted 15 years ago

   Has anyone compared traffic for the same hub title phrase, with and without the hyphens that hubpages puts into the title when you separate each word in your title?
   Does it matter?

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   1. 63

      darksideposted 15 years agoin reply to this

      It wouldn't be an easy test to try, because of too many variables. But I do feel strongly that the URL doesn't matter.
      
      Whether it's hubpages.com/hub/theurlisalloneword or hubpages.com/hub/the-url-is-separated-by-hyphens or even hubpages.com/hub/the_url_is_separated_by_underscores
      
      It comes down to personal preference.
      
      Wikipedia uses underscores. Other sites will use hyphens. And when it's allruntogether seems to work fine on other sites. I think it's the quality of the keywords that are selected that will give one URL an advantage over another. Having keywords will be better than a Wordpress default, eg: http://www.atypicalwordpressblog.com/?p=39, but it doesn't stop Search Engines from indexing such pages. As long as there's a decent title being used for the page.
      
      Something that does concern me though is the lack of thought of people choosing hubpage URLs. Choosing URLs and titles that have nothing to do with the topic. And also extra hyphens in the URL.
      
      I had been thinking about writing a forum thread on it and posting it in the 30 Day Hub Challenge sub-forum to highlight a few things to avoid. They won't have a negative impact on the "indexability" of the hubs, but... more on that soon.

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2. 84

   Whitney05posted 15 years ago

   are you talking about the url? or the title?  i wouldn't use hyphens in the title unless you're separating two phrases not indvidual words. Hubpages doesn't alter your title, you do that; they only add the hyphens to the url to supplement the spaces in your title.
   
   as for the url, i don't think it matters, but you wouldn't be able to test for the same hub because once you make the url, you can't change it.
   
   You wouldn't be able to go from
   
   test-url-for-hubpages
   to
   testurlforhubpages
   
   and back if you feel the first had better results.

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3. 60

   MRdivmanposted 15 years ago

   Hi Whitney05 & darkside,
   Thanks for your help.  The only difference I've seen so far is that titles with words run together don't seem to come up well when I search within hubpages.com for them.  I'll probably stick with separated for that reason.
   Best regards,
   MRdivman

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