Here’s a trip: I was interested in learning more about how to make a URL more findable and when I Googled it (findability URLs), the 7th entry down was from Aarron’s blog! I read through his articles and found the general guidelines about URLs – i.e., adding keywords to your URLs make them more findable. I also found specific info suggesting incorporating the title of a blog post into the URL, and instructions on how to do that with WordPress. However, what I was interested in is something Aarron had mentioned in class that I didn’t catch – it was something about why you use hyphens in a URL as opposed to underlines.

Hmm. Back to Google. . . this time, try: findability URLs hyphens.
Success! I found an article (‘Google test: hyphen and underscore’) that explained exactly what I was curious about. Here’s what I learned: If you separate words with hyphens (in either a URL or the body text), Google registers each word as a separate keyword. Thus, Google would see ‘red-rose’ as having ‘red’ as a keyword and also ‘rose’ as a keyword. However, Google reads an underscore as a way to connect the words. So red_rose would be seen as a single keyword: ‘red_rose’. Yea! I learned something!