SEO Question

Of course SEO changes by the day, but these days for the sole purposed of SEO does it matter whether you register cookingschool.com or cooking-school.com?

Of course the difference being the hypen between the two words.

In the past I've felt that the URL seems to carry the least amount of weight in the big picture of SEO so does it make a difference today?

Thanks,
-Mike McGroarty

[Ankesh]

Thanks for asking about SEO Mike.

cookingschool.com or cooking-school.com
Purely from SEO point of view, both should work equally well.
But most people will forget to put hyphens. So go with the one without hyphens.

(Also from SEO point of view, URLs make a huge huge huge difference in getting ranked higher up.)

Keyword rich urls are easier to optimize and also gains higher ranking in search engines, this is how SEO works for URL's

For me cooking-school will work better since this in a way serves as two different words. Unlike cookingschool which sometimes may be considered as one word only. But if your meta tags and keywords are rich and you have a good onsite and offsite optimization, I think both will work out to your benefits.