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This blog is run and written by Lewis Smile. You can hire him at BuildMyLens.com and YourNicheBlog.com. He does some mighty fine things on these internets ;)

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Using-Hyphens-In-Your-Lens-URL (for Google AND visitors)

June 13th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

Filed Under: Google Rankings

You know when you create a lens you get to choose what URL you want? (what’s a URL? Basically, the address of a page).

You get to choose whatever goes where these X’s are: www.squidoo.com/XXXXXXX 

It is largely agreed upon that having hyphens separating words is a good thing, as far as your google ranking is concerned.

Hyphens-as-opposed-to-underscores.  Underscores_are_thought_to_be_not_as_effective. NorAreWordsThatJustRunOnAndOnLikeOneBigWord.

As a general rule, I would say that if you have more than 1 word in the URL you should think about adding hyphens.

As an example, I preferred to choose squidoo.com/little-shop-of-horrors for one of my lenses instead of squidoo.com/littleshopofhorrors

The name of that movie is often abbreviated to little shop, so if I was choosing that as the URL I would probably want it to be squidoo.com/littleshop instead of squidoo.com/little-shop

It’s small enough to look neat as a run-on word.

If it’s not small enough to be neat as a little run-on word, consider hyphens instead of lettingthewholesentencelookassillyasthis!

This way you’re making it easier for people to read the link they’re clicking, and easier for the google computers to differentiate between words.

As a joke I started this lens a while ago: www.squidoo.com/thelargestguestbookmodulesquidoohaseverseen

- Lewis

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There Are 7 Responses So Far. »

1. 

   Comment by Anne on 13 June 2007:

   Lewis,

   I agree that using hyphens is a very effective technique. I’ve been using them for several months, and it does seem that Google picks up my pages (on my web site as well) fairly quickly. And it is much easier to read.

   Anne
2. 

   Comment by mrlewissmile on 13 June 2007:

   Hi Anne,

   Another useful point is how all the major blogging services (including blogger - owned by google) automatically format the web addresses of new blog posts with hyphens.

   Thanks for stopping by here Anne!

   - Lewis
3. 

   Comment by B Carter on 14 June 2007:

   I have noticed that you do this in quite a few of your lenses and I was wondering if I should be doing this myself.

   Now I know, thanks for the info. Keep up the great blog.
4. 

   Comment by mrlewissmile on 14 June 2007:

   There be no Squidoo secrets on these here shores…
5. 

   Comment by thefluffanutta on 15 June 2007:

   Hyphens rule!

   On a related note, I don’t like how Squidoo suggests tags which are runtogether (i.e. no spaces). I really can’t see how they can be of any use for a lens. What do you think?

   thefluffanutta
6. 

   Comment by mrlewissmile on 18 June 2007:

   Hi Fluff,

   The run-on tags they suggest do seem pretty ridiculous.

   You will see a post about that soon!
7. 

   Comment by Marlon on 21 June 2007:

   I used double hyphens, i.e. — between the words becuase the pharase i wanted was taken. Any thoughts?

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