No matter what domain name you ultimately land on, you may want to stick to the following 7 best practices:

1. Your domain name should be as short as possible.

Shorter domains are easier for direct-type ins, don’t overflow on business cards, can be fully visible in search engines, and are social media friendly

2. Don’t even think of settling for the .co TLD of your brand just because it might be available.

Although, there are many popular products and companies like calendar.co, angel.co and pocket.co they still likely lose large amounts of traffic to the .com versions of their domain which are completely unrelated to their business.

3. Don’t rely on hyphens in your domain.

They are easy to forget and confuse with the version of the domain names that don’t use hyphens.

4. Don’t use domains that are at all related to someone else’s trademark.

This practice is illegal and can land you in legal hot water quick if someone finds out and decides to sue you. Even worse, any brand equity that you build into the domain will be lost as soon as you get that cease and desist notice.

5. Use keywords, if at all possible.

Even if there is little SEO value to a keyword-rich domain, it will still build better keyword to domain associations with your customers. For example, if you sell cupcakes having the word cupcake in your domain will make it pretty obvious what you do.

6. But don’t stuff keywords!

It will look terrible to users and not help with search engines. CupcakeMuffinsCakeCookies.com doesn’t get you very far with anyone.

7. Buy similar domain names.

Purchase easy misspells and other popular TLDs if they are available to keep anyone from squatting on your business name. This could be costly later once you have built up a brand and the domain squatters know that you don’t really have any negotiating leverage once you decide to buy them.

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