One of the suggestions under my Digital Marketer’s Twitter 100+ Master List was to put together a list of SEO experts to follow on Twitter. The day has finally come and today I will indeed focus on the Search Engine Optimization experts you don’t want to miss.

Here is my list (not a ranking, just a list of folks and online resources — broken into two lists, arranged by the number of followers on the day of this post — whose tweets I often find to be of great help):

People

1. Matt Cutts — Famous Googler (been with the company since January 2000). Head of Google’s Webspam team.
2. Rand Fishkin — CEO & Co-Founder of SEOmoz. He tweets 15-20 times each week, mostly insights and articles about startups, search and social.
3. Aaron Wall — Founder of SEO Book (aka SEOBook.com), the #1 SEO training program.
4. Nate Moller — SEO and Social Media specialist in Utah & an eCommerce mentor. Passion for blogging, social media, and biz partnerships.
5. Shimon Sandler — Passionate about Search Marketing (SEO and PPC). SEO consultant. Tweeting about Search Engine industry news, strategies, and tactics.

Blogs/Resources:

1. Search Engine Land
2. Search Engine Journal
3. SEO Book
4. Search Engine Watch
5. Search Engine Roundtable

With lists like these, its inevitable for me to miss some people who may be regarded by you as real stars worthy the inclusion. I apologize if this has happened. If I have indeed missed your favorite SEO expert (or resource), please do post about them below, and I will make sure they make my next huge master list of Twitter accounts for digital marketers to follow.

I have been recommending affiliates to use keyword-rich domain names more aggressively, and I myself have been experimenting with different types of domains and how well they do with search engines. Today I would like to share with you my experience with hyphenated domain names.

Some are saying that hyphens in domain names are a “no-no” for SEO “because people won’t remember to put them in when they’re trying to remember how to access your site” (not sure where the connection with SEO is though), while others state that it isn’t bad for your SEO at all, and hyphenated domain names do well with narrow search engine searches.

A little over a year ago I registered two domain names: both in highly competitive niches, one – hyphenated, another one – not. The non-hyphenated one reached the #1 position on Google and MSN (it still keeps it with Bing, but dropped a bit in Google) about a month after its registration and loading content, whereas the hyphenated one did relatively well with other search engines, but wasn’t very successful with Google. Here are its current rankings across 6 different search engines:

• Google – not in the top 100
• Yahoo! – #3
• Bing – #8
• AOL – not in the top 100
• AltaVista – #3
• AllTheWeb – #3

Based on this experience, I would recommend looking for a non-hyphenated domain name over a hyphenated one.

If, however, you do decide to go with a domain name that contains separators (such as hyphens or underscores), you want to stay away from underscores. Earlier this year Matt Cutts of Google has strongly recommended hyphens over underscores because at this time, and in case with Google, “dashes or hyphens are treated a separators, and underscores are not.”

Finally, remember that while metatags no longer matter much, your page titles and inbound links still matter a lot.

Over the past few days I have been polling my blog’s readers on the question of whether they believe domain age matters for SEO. As expected, the majority of poll participants has chosen the positive answer (if you haven’t yet voted, I’d appreciate your vote right now — before you read through the end of this post).

Contrary to popular belief that domain age is valuable for SEO, Google does not believe in aged domains. Regardless of how some may interpret Google’s “Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data” patent filed back on 03/31/2005, much depends on the quality of the history. The company’s engineer Matt Cutts made some interesting remarks earlier this year:

Cutts stressed that domain age has not as much affect on rankings as some may think. “What makes a really big difference is the quality of your site, and the sort of links that you have pointing to you” he said. “Make great content” and “don’t worry nearly as much about how many years your domain is registered for”.

A UK-based IT industry analyst, Phip Payne added:

Domain age is perhaps part of the “trust” factor.  There are supposedly over 200 factors in site ranking — a history of good behaviour may well be one of them.  Not age of itself, but a track record of being properly handled during that time.

So, focus on site’s content and inbound links (the latter, by the way, will come naturally if quality content is being consistently added). Buying an aged domain does not necessarily mean a good decision. Much depends on the favorability of the historical data in Google’s (and other search engine’s) eyes.