Better to hyphenate URL or no?

[tiffany1103]

Sea Glass Jewelry or Sea-Glass-Jewelry

My domain name does not have my keyword in it, so I have been using the category as a means to get the keyword in the URL.  My site would say www.abcdefghijk.com/sea-glass-jewelry/sterling-starfish-necklace

When I run the review, it tells me that I have too many parameters.  Is it too long? Should I remove hyphens? Which is better?

[George.Fanucci]

URL Readability = Clickability (providing the URL is not too long.)

When you see results in SERPS, the readability (reading ease for a human reader) can help your click-thru rates. It helps the reader to understand if they are interested in your content. Also, it helps search engines to know what your page is about. Underscores are not nearly as good. Category names are often automatically hyphenated by most shopping cart systems, no?

[eugenecomputergeeks]

I know Google has announced they prefer hyphens to underscores  ( website.com/this-is-better)  (website.com/this_is_not).  Personally I think it depends on the situation and  agree to not overdo it.  With longer URL's its hard to read with no spacing.

[MattAntonino]

The hyphens are ok but I would be careful not to overdo it.  When you say "too many parameters" - when talking about SEO, these aren't parameters.  If you're doing ecommerce, parameters will be the bits that limit or narrow down your products, such as size.

www.example.com/pink-tshirts?size=xl

?size=xl is the parameter.

You may run into duplication issues if you have too many parameters (such as color of shirts where nothing else on the page changes.)