In direct navigation, users type exactly what they are looking for in the browser's web address field. This could be the exact domain name or web address. Millions of people do this, emphasizing the need for on- and off-line marketing and branding.

Over many generations, fortunes in the business world were made through buying and selling products in physical stores. Internet fortunes have been made buying and selling products online.

Traditional horizontal search engines cannot always identify the target audience, niche or vertical industry of a page or site. Vertical search engines address this issue by the nature of their design. They identify sites according to more specific criteria and sometimes even by human input.

Direct navigation traffic is by far the most highly targeted form of web traffic available.

The purpose of driving traffic to your online business is to get customers. Once a prospect lands on your site, you still have to convert that prospect into a buyer.

I ended up buying business.com for $150,000 because I wanted to make it a magazine. It would have been a 'Time'-type magazine: how to do business on the Internet. And I was offered a lot of money for that domain. I played two buyers against each other.

Domain names and websites are Internet real estate.