Hyphens in Domain Names Help SEO?

I've recently been analysing a potential new client, www.red-art.co.uk, to see where they can improve performance in natural search.



I've got Google Webmaster implemented on the site so I can see the 'gospel according to Google' when it comes to backlinks and search terms the site ranks for.

Looking at the search term rankings some interesting results start to appear. Almost all the terms the site ranks or include the word 'red' in them. Phrases like 'red wall art', 'red canvas art' and so on.

So that made me wonder where Google is picking up the word 'red' from, and why is it thinking it is a key describer of the site's content, when it just happens to be part of the company name?

Strangely, Red does not appear in any of the usual suspects. Page Titles have already been optimised by someone else with product related terms (although they probably rent as focused as they could be). The term Red does not appear in site content, only as an image of the logo, and that doesn't even have an alt tag completed. Red does appear in the anchor text of backlinks to the site, but not as the top term.

Which just leaves one candidate - the URL. Now I'm not normally a fan of hyphenated domain names. They are cumbersome to type and read out, and just look messy. But in this case it seems that the hyphen in the url is flagging up Red as a key search term for Google and influencing search results accordingly.

Now in this case I can't suggest changing the site URL, so there's a fair bit of work to redress the balance in favour of non-red phrases.

But for other projects and clients, this raises an interesting hypothesis which I will need to test. I'm already getting good results with using keyword rich domains on holding pages to point back to client sites. Now I'll try some with the use of hyphens in them and see what happens.