In an earlier posting on image search optimization [1], I mentioned how image search utilities and photo album sites could potentially be tapped for great referral traffic. Some people have ridiculed the idea, on the false assumption that only porn sites can get good referral traffic from such sites. However, this is really naive thinking — there are many, many reasons why people use and explore such sites. Providing many images related to your site content and optimizing them can result in some really great referral traffic — some accidental, and some purposeful. It can take some experimentation to use it successfully in a way that can convert.
I use Flickr a lot for my personal pix, and a few of my photos have gotten really great attention, inbound links, and then resultant traffic.
One of the pix was from Google Maps in which a building was coincidentally in the shape of a Nazi swastika [2]. That pic got traded around in a bit of a viral distribution until one of the major newspapers in Norway picked up on it [3], wrote a couple of articles about the building, and then linked back to my Flickr page. The result? Thousands of visits and pageviews to that Flickr pic of mine. If I’d linked the picture over to some other site of mine, I could’ve gotten some great additional traffic.
Conclusion? Image search sites and photo album sites are definitely a great source of traffic referrals.