It is now proven that search engines like usage of hyphens (-) in the URLs which makes it user friendly and search engine friendly as well. The concept of reading the URLs have changed by time in which the constant concept is the significance of keywords being used is in descending order i.e the crawlers read the URLs from left to right and give importance to the initial keyword used and decreases value while moving onwards till end of the URL.
The new concept of URL crawling is that crawlers are now more sensitive in extracting or matching the exact keyword being typed in while searching. Hyphens are considered to be as separators and crawlers deal each word separately and now also compares by making various combinations of the words related to the searched keyword in the search engine to pull up the most related website for the users. This feature of making combinations have helped SEOs in many ways due to which they are now able to target more than one keyword at a time in a web page. According to a post in Search Engine Land, it is preferred to use 3 to 5 words in a URL at maximum.
A good example would be of a keyword like “smartten.com/message-mania”. In this example, 5 words have been used to target keywords, “messages mania, funny messages, mobile messages and sms messages ”. Now search engines are so much clever that whenever anyone searches for any of the keywords above, they will show the same page in the search results by matching word by word according to the search query.
