In the domaining industry, we have a commonly used term called natural traffic, which is basically defined as traffic to the domain from people typing the address directly into their web browser.  Bloggers will often refer to this direct traffic. 

I think that as bloggers and veterans of the internet, we often forget that not everyone uses a feed reader or searches to find what they are looking for.  Heck, only about 20% of the world has internet access, and I would guess that less than 10% are regular users and use search engines to get where they aer going.  There are many people that still type a URL to get where they are going, so if they are looking for information on monkeys, they will just try visiting monkeys.com, etc.  

Natural traffic is an extremely powerful and often overlooked tool for bloggers.   Ever wonder why Porn.com sold for 12 million dollars?  It’s easy to find a much better keyword-rich domain for under $100.00, but those domains won’t get any natural traffic.

As a blogger, I think to much focus is often placed on Search Engine Optimization and not enough focus is on marketing yourself to potential readers.   While it is best to have a keyword-rich domain, people looking to also develop natural traffic need to place their focus on having a strong and easy memorized brand that goes along with their website.   Avoid using the plural version of words and avoid words that are easily mis-spelled.   You will also have trouble getting any natural traffic without a dot com domain. 

If you want to read some more about natural traffic, Daily Blog Tips covered this in a recent post, Direct traffic: 5 reasons you should care.   This is a big reason I re-branded this site under a new domain and so far I am very pleased with the results!