DOMAIN NAME BASICS

The only characters allowed in a Domain Name are the 26 letters of the standard alphabet, numbers 0-9, and hyphens (-).

A Domain cannot begin or end with a hyphen, but it can contain a hyphen.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, also know as ICANN serves as the governing body for Domain Name registration.

ICANN is currently allowing up to 67 characters including the .com, .net, or .org

The underscore and the space are not acceptable characters in a Domain Name.

www.meta-learning.co.uk is a site I took on about a month ago and carried out SEO work on it. I am in the process of SEM for it.  Nonetheless the site has moved 7 million places in the Alexa rank system in under a month.  I have chosen this domain because it is has a hyphen in the domain and in its Meta title, keyword and descriptions tags.

Test #1: only results with Keyword in that order, found together and fused together Keyword1Keyword2

"meta learning" (Position 11 in Google)

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=meta+learning

Returned 660,000 results

Test #2: only results with Keyword in that order, and found together

"meta-learning" (Position 12 in Google)

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=meta-learning&btnG=Search

96,700 results