It seems all extensions are taken except .info and hyphenated.
I can have “how-to-do-this.com” or “howtodothis.info”. Please tell me which one is easy to SEO. I really need this particular domain but everything is taken except fo these 2 options…
I tried SEOing .info before and I can tell it’s really hard… I haven’t tried SEOing hyphenated domain with top extension yet…
Thanks
url name advantage is most lenient excuse provided by search engines so if one can take advantage with 1.99$ domain name why not to grab it…
my first thought,
if both names are available and u r serious about it,then whats problem is registering both domain and seeing the result…it would just cost 1.99$ more 
very cheap for SEO case
(after all,most of thought in seo is just a guess…or from experience…so best is to test urself)
theoritically ,- should be treated like space,but i think 2-3 hypen is dangerous and will not have any human readble value…so info may be an option but info domain name are still being tested i guess,even they say all top level extensions doesnt has any significant different in seo
Of course I will grab both domains but the thing is my SEO activity… I don’t want to waste time you know… The moment I start doping SEO on a particular domain, there is no turning back… I always like /com but the hyphen is what making me confused…
There are other people who like domains with hyphens… take a look at this example…
language-school-teachers.com - pr5 and a very active site
But the following are still available…
languageschoolteachers.net
languageschoolteachers.org
languageschoolteachers.biz
languageschoolteachers.info
perhaps, the owner were not focusing on SEO / or had a little knowledge on SEO when he/she created the above site… or perhaps he/she just love .com and didn’t value other extensions like net.
Strange… I don’t understand how the owner came up with such domain when the keyword “language school teacher” is not good… I don’t he/she did a keyword research here… I think he/she just fabricated this domain out of his/her needs.
Back to the topic… I am still doing more research and I hope I can twist my preferred domain and found a good and keyword that would fit… My last option is biz over info since I will be selling software…
The URL of your website - including whether or not it has hyphens, and which TLD you use - makes no difference at all to search engines.
Search engines care about the quality of your content, how well they can navigate and understand your site, and the number of relevant inbound links (among other things), but they really, really, really don’t care about whether you use .com or .info, or whether you hyphenated your domain name.
What will matter is how easily you can market either domain name. My preference in general is to go for no hyphens, but on the other hand .com is easier to market. The danger, whichever one you choose, is that too many people will end up on howtodothis.com…
well i guess,you dont need to work on both domain name and redirect one domain to another (what you are trying here is to get a domain name advantage)…not 100% foolproof but i think it is right way
may be that names were free later,(did you check whois).More than 60% of the good names are still with domain traders who has not intension of running the site…so may be the case,
otherwise as u say i also dont see any reason why would she prefer – domain than even .net domain
i have feeling that both domains will do good…
well i dont know what do you mean when you say that …
if you mean tld only (.com,.net ,.info etc execpt country based tld) has no difference for seo than i agree
but if you say domain name itself for eg music.com doesnt have any relevance or SE dont give priority to it ie domain name…then i strongly disagree…
As you know as well most the the SEO debates are all about guessing …(google is not opensource atleast 
) so we are speaking from our experience and have taken advantage of it ourself in dozen of occasions in last few years…
i think there is video of matt cutt where he agrees with this,plus even every book says so atleast in this case…
so i think it is the case
Yes, very strange that the owner chose a domain name that perfectly describes the site. What were they thinking of. 
just to clarify, i think when he says that ,he means why the site owner took hased domain name when .net with out hash was available as non hashed domain name should be considered as better option than hashed one…
Jun was talking about the choice of keywords in the domain, not the use of hyphens, if I’m not mistaken:
You’re right, I didn’t phrase it very well.
What I meant was:
yup…again i think i agree with you in all cases above
except that the it “make a tiny difference to how search engines see the site, but the effect will be very limited”
i dont say it is only the factor there are myriad other factors that also plays the role but what i am trying is say is
if you lauch a site related to xyz (keyword) and put abc.com as domain(may be better than xyz.com and abc.com not a bigger older site) then xyz.com will have definate advantage for keyword xyz…
or that person wont have got into position in SERP lauching xyz.com if he has lauched site with domain name abc.com (even in the same content)
We dont know it is right or wrong,but one thing about serp is dance how music is played…
plus we have some stories for this case,but i dont think forum is right place to disclose that …but having said that it is not any blackhat seo or so on…
I found another way to sort this out by doing more and more keyword research… I was like an idiot doing 4 hours of research just for a single keyword domain and at last I got the .net… Time to rock and roll… !
Interesting conversation though, thanks