Yes, no hyphens in the domain name. Thanks for clarifying, Donna.

Hyphens are definitely a good idea. They make the URL easier to read and more user-friendly. (See more about it from Webmaster Tools Help here.)

"Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs."

I noindex my tags and archives, but there is also a Yoast setting for those, same place but under "Other" rather than "Taxonomies".

1. In Yoast, you use a wildcard that slightly switches up the description for each category, like this: "Archive of posts categorized %%term_title%% in my blog, "Wonderful Blog."

2. Yes

If you have Yoast (SEO Plugin) you can do that in the settings. (Choose Titles & Metas, then click on the Taxonomies tab.) You can also do it directly, under posts > categories.

Having dates in the URLs would discourage people from clicking on older posts in the SERPs, so you would be skewing your old posts vs new posts comparison in favor of new posts. Also, evergreen content can be really great for a site but those would be hard to come by with dates in the URLs I think, even if they are still very relevant.

However, there are certainly plenty of sites, like many Wordpress sites, that have dates in the URLs automatically so there are definitely people who successfully do this.