A client phoned me to say she had made some corrections on some web pages I had worked on.

“I made the hyphens consistent,” she said. She explained that on some pages I had hyphenated a particular word and on other pages, I hadn’t.

Oops! She had just destroyed a strategic search engine optimization (SEO) tactic.

Sometimes when folks search for something they will hyphenate words. Other times they will run them together. Or they just might type them both out separately.

For example, some might type: bunk-beds or bunk beds or bunkbeds.

So sometimes optimizing pages for the different word combinations help businesses to rank for all terms.

My sources tell me that the search engines ignore punctuation so bunk-beds and bunk beds are interchangeable.

But bunkbeds could trigger different search results. To cover all bases, you should optimize your website for both terms “bunk beds” and “bunkbeds.”

For the sake of style, I prefer to be consistent on a particular page. So I might use “bunk beds” consistently on one page. On another page, I might use “bunkbeds.”

In the title tag, though, I will use both terms.

It’s this kind of careful SEO detail work that helps owners stay three steps ahead of their competition.

Easy Web Tip 83: For search engine optimization (SEO), it makes sense to be inconsistent when it comes to hyphenation.