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Factors in buying your domain url.

You do not need your keywords in your domain, but its good to have them. However I now actually prefer branding and using that name in your url. Avoid having a hyphen, (but its still perfectly fine) unless its just a adsense kind of site, then one hyphen is ok. If you are selling stuff, having no hyphens, makes it easier for the site to be remembered. Read about branding here.

Try and get minimum 2 years domain registration, or if you are going for a .com try and get 5-10 years. This will further prove to the search engines you are serious and not a fly by spammer. **

Get your keywords using Google Adwords Keyword Tool

or Market Samurai

My personal rules.

1. Never have more than one hyphen.

2. If you are targeting a country, buy the correct country TLD to target it, i.e targeting english farmers use. keyword1keyword2.co.uk But if you are targeting worldwide, you should use .com or .net, bearing in mind that people trust .com more and is far more likely to be clicked on.

Remember if you get mistakes in your domain registration address, you can be fined a small amount. Make sure its as accurate as possible.

Domain Privacy

If you want to keep your address private, you should use domain privacy, which costs around the same as a domain per year. If you buy more than 10 domains with godaddy at any time, they will do free privacy on all domains.

Further reading on domain privacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_privacy

Buy Your Domain.

I use godaddy.com to buy and manage my domains. You do not have to use their hosting.

http://www.godaddy.com/

Canonical wrote this fine post

"If the main keyword phrase that you want to rank for is "keyword1 keyword2" then having a domain name that is an EXACT match helps a lot once you get some backlinks to your site with your domain name or URL as the link text IMO. It's definitely not going to instantly rank JUST because of the domain name. So...

keyword1keyword2.com
keyword1keyword2.net
keyword1-keyword2.com
keyword1-keyword2.net

Although, if it's NOT an exact match like:

keyword1.keyword3com
keyword2.keyword3.net
keyword1.-keyword3.com
keyword2.-keyword3.net
keyword1keyword3keyword2.com
keyword1keyword3keyword2.net
keyword1-keyword3-keyword2.com
keyword1-keyword3-keyword2.net

then it seems to carry significantly less weight. So if you can't get a domain that is an exact match for your "money" keyword phrase then I wouldn't worry too much about which domain you pick. I'd probably go with something similar like a partially matching domain name with a .com TLD.

As long as you are comparing non-country specific TLDs then the TLD has no bearing on your rankings at Google IMO. A .com has an equal chance of ranking as a .net. Google.com is TLD agnostic if you are comparing non-country specific TLDs. Maybe it matters at some of the other engines, but I tend to care less about the others like Yahoo!, Live/Bing, Ask because they drive an insignificant amount of traffic to our sites.

However, which TLD you select might effect your ability to get back links. Perhaps other webmasters are more inclined to link to .coms than to .nets because they somehow view them (like many consumers do) as more official. The TLD definitely effects click-thru-rate once you show up in the SERPs. My experience has been that people looking for businesses are more likely to click on .com than .net in the SERPs. People looking for non-profit organizations are more likely to click on a .org than a .com or .net. And so on..."

Source: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1417653

** I did say about registering your domain for longer to help.. Matt Cutts does mention in this video that these claims are based on a patent. But he doesnt actually say that its not true. So just incase they change things later or they do already, best to buy a longer period. Here he is talking about it.

Top level and Country Code Top Level Domains

http://www.norid.no/domenenavnbaser/domreg.html

How much does a domain's age affect its ranking?