Which is better for SEO?

[MeanerDomainer]

Let's say someone has an internet based store (no physical store-front) and wants to experiment with building his own backlink for the website.

If the exact target keyword term for the store is "word1 word2" (and it must be those 2 words together in that order), then which is best for SEO:

A) word1word2.me (Or some other unknown "random" extension)

or

B) word1word2word3.com (assume that this combo with word3 added shows no substantial search volume and all word1word2word3.com combos with decent volume are already taken).

or

C) hyphenated word1-word2.us (word1-word2.com .net. org .info are already taken. Target market is US, less than 1% of orders has been international, due to cost of shipping, international orders are not expected to grow substantially). Is this the winner for SEO?

or

D) word1word2word3.net or .org where this 3 word combo has some search volume, although an order of magnitude less than word1word2.

Which will be easiest to rank in Google over time for the search term "word1 word2"???

 

[howinfo]

I would go for option D. But having said that you do not really need keywords in domain to rank well. As long as you do your on and off page seo right and have keywords you are targeting on your website you can rank really well without having those keywords in your domain.

 

[Jaco]

If your target market is the US and your only marketing concern is SERP performance, word-word.us is the best choice if your goal is to rank for "word word".
It's 'ugly' from a domainer perspective, but it will perform as an exact match and you'll get a ccTLD bump for US searchers.

Bear in mind, there's no such thing as "easiest to rank" when you're talking about a pair of keywords where the hyphenated versions are taken down to .info. That's obviously a pretty lucrative and desirable space and I'd bet there's going to be some real competition. In hyper-competitive spaces like that, an exact matching name can be nice since it adds a little advantage, but at the end of the day, rank is going to come down to other factors.