Difference between "And" and(!) "-"

[stephenfishman]

I have a brand name "Smith and Jones". I am looking for the current best way to refer to the name in titles and text on my site.

The manufactureres website is smithandjones.com . The H1 on their home page uses Smith & Jones. The 2 versions are used throughout their site.

In a prior thread (http://www.seomoz.org/q/and-vs) the answer was to use nothing ie "smith jones".

I was thinking that a "-" might be better since google says it tends to show a strong relationship between the 2 words.

What do you think?

Thanks

Handcrafter

[rrad]

I think you have to be careful when leaving out "Stop Words" because there is not a definitive list of what is a stop word.  There are occasions in phrase search where it doesn't make sense for the search engines to leave out what seems like a stop word.  For instance "The Who" (rock band).  If you do a Google search for "and" you get results that refer to businesses and entities with "and" in the title.  I would stick with "and".

[RebekahMay]

Words like "and" are usually ignored by search engines, but the and symbol (&) is used in parameters and might confuse search engines, I think the best option is to use the hyphen (- ) since "and" will be ignored anyway and cut down on length.