ArticMine I'm not at all an expert on SEO and you seem to know something about it, so I would ask whether xmr not being a word makes a difference. I'm thinking that bitcoinfoundation may be parsed by search engines as "bitcoin foundation", as would likewise moneroeconomy, but xmrmonero but they might have trouble with?
I also wonder how much domain names matter to SEO. Isn't it mostly based on linking? I would think any of these sites would become well-linked on the web from all sorts of cryptocurrency sites and articles as long as Monero continues to grow and MEW continues to be active in efforts to promote it.
My experience with SEO is that it is as much an art as a science. We are dealing in fact with the constantly changing propriety algorithms of Google and other search engines who are trying to provide relevant search. What matters is that the keyword or term is
naturally used within the site, linking can play a key role particularly if the site that is doing the linking is not seen by the search engine as related (Sharing an IP address for example). If it is also present in the domain name then that strengthens the SEO provided it is seen as a natural use of the word. The whole here is not the sum of its parts.
To understand SEO one must understand the conflicting interests. In the classic SEO battle the site is aiming for a very profitable highly competitive and generic keyword such as hotels or travel, while the search engine is trying to provide the most relevant results for say travel and Joe's recent affiliate travel site is not even close. If Joe's affiliate travel site tries to artificially push for travel or hotels and the search engine detects this expect a severe penalty on the site. My take is that highly generic terms such as "economy" or "money" in a domain name can actually hurt SEO for this reason if the search engine thinks the site is aiming for a not justified ranking on say economy, money etc. If the goal is a ranking on economy then that of course is an entirely different objective and the SEO has now increased in difficulty by many orders of magnitude.
The way to compare how generic a search term is, is to search each term and see what the competition is like by looking at the number of results. It is also very important to start with a fresh browser session with no search engine cookies saved. One also has to consider that the search engine may skew results based on the location from which the search in made. Finally one must not log into the search engine while doing these kind of tests.
We start with:
Monero: 550,000 results. Dominated by Monero the currency. The first non Monero as a currency results are on page 3 of Google. one of which has the term in the domain. without a dash I must add.
XMR: 1,050,000 results. Here XMR as the currency is strong but is in competition with XMR as an ATV, clothing etc.
Economy 696,000,000 results. Way to generic to even consider targeting.
Strengthening our position on XMR as a search term while supporting our position on Monero as a search term seems like a reasonable and achievable objective here.
A site about Monero will naturally use the terms "Monero" and "XMR" so a search engine encountering for example xmrmonero.com would parse the name since it is considering the whole site not just the domain name when ranking the site. If there is one thing about SEO that I have learned over the years is that one has to consider the whole site not just the domain name, keywords, links, content etc. A possible concern that the search engine would not parse XMRMonero, because the terms are not that well known, is why I considered xmr-monero.com at a point; however upon giving this more thought I still consider xmrmonero.com the best choice since the site will naturally use both of these terms.