I started a test blog in late 2009 to learn all there is to know about generating traffic.

A hotel site will feature pictures of hotels. However, I acted a bit cheeky and linked images from other sites (though I referenced them at the source and with links).

Anyway, we can leave this issue aside as it is not the key issue to consider right now.

I want to generate traffic. I have been working gradually but relying certainly on Backlinks and other strategies, and slowly but with certainty over time I am beginning to experience a small increase in the number of visitors.

Still, I am not so sure about one of the major traffic sources we are using now. There is a referrer in Google Analytics called as '/imgres'.

This doesn’t really aid me a whole lot as it is unable to tell me what images were exclusively viewed or where these searches are exactly coming from. Though I have tried to look around at other options I can’t seem to make much sense of it.

If it is a way in which I can get traffic, that’s excellent. However I cannot monitor it and thus can’t manage it either.

Does anyone know anything I could look for this issue?

Kindly provide your blog url, probably i may check it out

It's simply where they have clicked through from the image gallery that Google shows the searcher.

Hey laaronblase, Totally know what your talking about with the /imgres referrer thing. I guess you've figured this out by now, but it's a visit from a Google image search. It really ought to be classified as search traffic, but for some reason Google Analytics and other stats programs group under the referrer category. Go figure.

It would be nice to have keyword info attached to these visits, but I haven't figured that one out yet.

Meanwhile I've been doing some searching to pick peoples brains about how to optimize for it, because it can be a good way to get traffic for competitive keywords without having to outcompete the sites in the top 10 for natural search.

Anyone have any tips besides the usual of optimizing your image tags for your keywords?

-Rob

I remember Google Webmaster Tool recently included a command on xml sitemap for images... maybe you can try it and see if it could help your site.

You can install and use Awstats on your server to have more control on all your website's traffic if you don't trust Google Analytics statistics.