The owner and CEO of Job.com, Brian Alden, was interviewed by Fredericksburg.com, and a couple of very interesting items came to light.
For one the owner says that 50% of the 8 million monthly visitors come to the site simply by them typing the domain into the browser.
Good old direct navigation which the search engines want us to believe is all but dead.
“About half of the site’s roughly 8 million unique visitors a month come on their own, without being directed from a referring site such as Google or Bing. That speaks in part to the intuitive domain name.”
Nice.
Of course the company actively markets it site, which in turn translates into all that traffic.
The other interesting tidbit from the interview was:
“Mr. Alden bought the domain name job.com in 2001 from a person who had paid $500 for it.”
However, the purchase price was not discussed in the article.
It’s in that select handful of names that has the inherent gravity of a million universes.
Probably the single best 3 letter domain name there is!
We should differentiate between the direct navigation as a result of marketing and advertising and direct navigation where people type in a URL in hopes of finding what they are looking for.
Let’s face it…Google get’s more “Direct Navigation” then anyone, but it’s not because people are coming there by chance.
Type in Traffic:
Why people will directly type in the domain name into the browser while there is SE?
I believe that type in traffic domains “direct navigation” will continue to existing. Personnally when making a search for a keyword I use a .com with it and usually discover a great websites.