domain name with or without hyphens...

Always without hyphens, if the .com is taken get the .net or org

Option 2 is better in term of SEO.

Try to get .com for your website.
.net for secondary choice if .com is unavailable.

With nada and penguin updates, these two factors are not so important.
Good Content, quality traffic, bounce rate, backlinks, Social presence are stuffs that Yu should target on.

Hope these help. Cheers!

No hyphens...long tail or not.. no hyphens

Yes, indeed. It's mostly about appearance, I think.

The answer is to buy both, anyway. Even if your domain looks better with hyphens (which many do), you wouldn't want to build a business on a domain-name of which the unhyphenated version belongs to someone else (which it may do, if you don't register it "protectively". Perhaps especially if you're successful!). You can register both and just redirect one to the other.

Hyphens don't affect SEO in any way. (Other threads discussing this contain a link to a Matt Cutts video in which he discusses and explains that).

All international top-level domains are exactly the same for all SEO considerations with Google. It's only some opinionated marketers who deny this. Google states this openly and repeatedly, on their websites, on their WebMaster Central Blog, on videos, in interviews with Matt Cutts, and so on. They've been saying it openly for years, now. A few people who've very publicly but mistakenly said the opposite in the past (and are a little embarrassed because of that) like to say now that they think Google must be "lying" about it (they're not quite so good at suggesting why Google might want to do that, though! ).

There's no SEO issue here at all, Fabian.

If you find people telling you that ".com ranks better than .net/.org" it's ok to throw rotting fruit at them. In fact it's encouraged.

However, there are many other potential reasons for wanting to own the .com. And some of them are rather compelling.

Resale value, for example. "Credibility" (that one's perhaps overstated, really). Loss of traffic to the .com owner (that's realistic enough). And so on.

In all cases of doubt, it makes sense to buy the .com.

But don't let anyone put you off hyphens, if they look better: that's nonsense (just register the unhyphenated version as well and redirect it to the one you're using). Domain-names are only a few bucks each; it's not worth worrying about these things.

Alexa's approach is the one I use if I am counting on SEO traffic or I need potential customers to remember the name. Buying both may seem like a costly affair but I use the hyphenated one in situations where SEO is not an issue, e.g., testing squeeze pages in the niche, or redirects.

Use long trail keyword. But don't use hyphens in your domain. Use .com domain.

Great post from Alexa. Completely agree here!
Also if your keyword is not very long and all the short domains are occupied, try some unconventional TLDs, it may help you to use your keywords and build a playful domain perception, they look really appealing and are easy to remember.

thanks a lot for the great feedback on that :-)

Alexa Smith explained it all, so thank you..

Fabian Long tail keyword without hyphen is much better then the 1 with hyphen..

Thanks

There is no longer an advantage to having exact match domain names as far as SEO goes, so IMO, there's not much reason to buy a hyphenated domain name when a branded or any other top level domain would do. It's the content that will count now in SEO, not the domain name.

I personally have always avoided hyphens in domain names as they don't resell very well.

I would always prefer domain names without hyphens.

If .com is not available, I will choose .net or .org instead.

Domain name with hyphens is better than without hyphens. Its benefit is that search engine also count your domain names keyword separately.