Type-in traffic

How many type in "keywords.com"?

[bluegrass]

I wonder if it is known what percentage of people find a site by guessing the URL?

Eg Typing in "www.shopjobs.com"

If it's appreciable it means its still sensible to go for keyword.com... Not that you can find them these days...

[creative craig]

I used to do that alot, sit in front of the screen and then just type in any word that came into my mind, then I found search engines :)

[mcavill]

down to 2 now craig

[Travel]

I still start with that for many things- personally I type in keywords when I want info more than to buy unless it's a brand name-
Example
I may type in allergy.com (I've never seen this site) if I wanted to find new things about allergy drugs, herbal remedies- just basic info gathering.

I personally would not type in something like television.com if I was looking to buy a tv though.

That said- I work with some people who have the bulk of their traffic through type ins- so it can be a viable option for a website although personally I would still work all the other angles of SEO.

[HitProf]

I think a lot of inexperienced user do that. They know they wil get a list of sites when 'Windows' can't find the site.

[richardb]

It's also a past time for bored students ;)

Rich

[trillianjedi]

I still do it. But as often as not it's a case of "... I wonder who had the foresight to buy *this* domain...".

;-)

Still works well for a lot of keywords, but has become inevitably more commercial now. Information sites can no longer afford to keep the top domains. That's changed over the last 4 or 5 years.

TJ

[mona]

I don't have the percentages, but I guess people do it a lot more that you might guess. There was a good discussion about this some time ago, I'll see if I can find that thread for ya...

[cfx211]

We lease a domain that is a big single word keyword, and I am not going to go into details except to say that you could fill a football stadium once a month with traffic from this domain, and all of their traffic is type in.

[PatrickDeese]

I still get a lot G & MSN referrers for searches like

"www+keyword+com"

I own a cyber cafe and have observed a startling percentage of people who don't know what the address bar is or how to use it.

Once a man who was a lawyer about 35 who was using the cafe actually told me that you "had to" use yahoo to go to websites.

Yah. He would type in Yahoo.com into the address bar, then type hotmail.com into the Y! search box.