To add your Avatar to your site is fairly simple.  Plugins are available for leading blog software and content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, Ruby on Rails and other software platforms.  The current WordPress version automatically will recognize your Gravatar. If you have a Gravatar from http://en.gravatar.com/ then many times this image will display in your WordPress site automatically.

Having a Gravatar for your Avatar is also great if you comment on blogs and videos. Some businesses will use their logo but most people prefer to be personal and use their photo or drawing.

To get started you create a login http://en.gravatar.com/site/signup.  From there you will upload your image, add more email addresses and add your profile.

After you have created your Gravatar, you will see your image and profile information when you comment on posts and other social networking sites like Youtube and Vimeo just like the image on the left of this post.

Don’t wait, go get your own Gravatar and spread your smile across the Internet.

Find a WordPress template which offers a place to enter meta titles and meta descriptions or install an SEO plugin.

Meta titles should make sense to the reader, but the wording should be based on keyword search popularity and relevance to the rest of the web page content. The meta title field is where you tell the search engines what you would like them to use when they display the page title in the search results list.  Your page title is what people see when they arrive at your site and is added to the top field above the Permalink: line in WordPress.  The meta title and page title do not need to be identical but it’s important to use the same keywords in both places.

The permalink should match the meta title making sure you use the keyword phrases you are targeting for that page/post article.  Be careful though, if you are re-working your pages for SEO you may already have search placement for the current permalink.  In that case, install the 301 redirect plugin to be sure you notify the search engines of your new page permalink or you will lose your ranking and your visitors could get a 404 page not found error message. However, if you don’t have search traffic coming to your site on that page (check your analytics for the site) don’t bother with the 301 redirects, they can be problematic if not cleaned up over time.  You’ll gain more ranking and traffic by making the changes than you would lose without the redirect.

You can get some good ideas for your titles by looking at top selling magazines such as Reader Digest.  They spent lots of money researching what headlines sell.

Examples of Good Titles

• Tips on Growing Flowers – How to Grow Flowers
• US Population Statistics – 2008 United States Population Statistics
• Chocolate Dessert Recipe – Best Chocolate Dessert Recipes for Chocolate Lovers
• Tax Tips – Tips on How to Pay Less Taxes  (someone nothing thinking about SEO might title it Tax Tips – Tips on How to Pay Less Taxes to Uncle Sam and adding Uncle Sam could confuse the search engines and decrease your impact)

When creating meta titles:

• Do repeat keyword phrases – no more than twice is usually best
• Do tie these phrases to your content and other meta data
• Do use plurals and word variations when possible
• Do limit the use of punctuation
• Do use initial caps throughout the title

Note that the above title tags accomplish three things:

1. They help robots understand what is most important about the content on the page by repeating part of the keyword phrases that would be found in article titles and content
2. They make sense to people reading them
3. By using plurals when sensible, it allows more possible keyword searchers (both on singular and plural or major keywords)

How Long Should a Meta Title Be in Length?

Generally, a title should be long enough to be clear; short enough to avoid being “truncated.”  Truncation happens when a title is too long. Search engine robots will only read so many characters then move on. Different search engines read different numbers of characters but if you keep your titles less than 150 characters you will keep most major search engine robots happy.

Use your keyword list, title your page/post using your keywords and write your meta titles.  Good luck!

If you have been using Constant Contact to generate email marketing campaigns to advertise your events you’ll like this.  You can now let your readers register and pay for the event within your email message.  Even better, you can send information directly as a Twitter feed and your readers can tell their Facebook friends they just registered for your event.

They offer an integrated ticketing system which gives marketers the option to create and distribute actual tickets to events that can be printed.   Guest registration functionality has also been added and offers the ability for registratants to register one or more guests, limit the number of guests each registrant can bring, assign different event fees for members and non-members, and allows registrants to pay for the event.  Other features include the ability to post event information directly to a Twitter feed and tell friends in FaceBook.

The cost is $10 a month if you already have an email marketing subscription and you only have to pay the month you use the service.  Now there’s an easy way to connect your social network and your events together doing what you already do with your email marketing campaigns.

With some good planning and a bit of work you can still get the love from other sites by way of “Link Bait”. The best strategy to gain the love is putting your energy into creating useful, valuable content that people will read, use, bookmark, link to, and recommend to others.

Share the love – link out. Although linking out to other sites carries the risk of sending people away, the benefits of being associated with high-level content should outweigh any negatives. Would you expect others to link to you if you don’t link to anyone else? Are you really a good authority if you don’t reference any other good information? Link out usefully and don’t overdo it and make sure you are linking to solid, reputable sites and content. You can search “seo bad neighborhoods” to learn more about site reputation.  You can reduce some of the readership loss by opening the link in a new window.

Now you have good content and you have links pointing to other sites. Notify the site owners of these love links which reference their site and inform them about your great content. Let them know they can return the love with links to your content.

If you have a self-hosted Word Press blog or website there are a few plugins which can help you easily share your content.

Ping services allow you to automatically notify blog directories and search engines that your blog has been updated. The larger your ping list the higher the chances of receiving traffic from those sources, WordPress users can modify their ping list on the Control Panel, then Options, then Writing.  To get a current list of the Ping services just search the web for a list but be sure to use the most up to date list you can find.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer will help you manage the pings to other blogs.  Be sure to add a plugin such as this one which limits the ping to one time per blog post, otherwise you may be banned from the blog directory for submission when you edit the post.

Blog Traffic Exchange has a free and pro version.  Basically you join a group of websites which post links on each others related blog posts.  The software takes care of determining which post’s topics relate to one another so it’s automated for you.  Your posts join the pool and receive a posting on related sites.

With time the love will come back to you with inbound links referencing your great and lovable content.

If you are struggling for a good headline adapt one from publications such as Cosmopolitan magazine.  Reader’s Digest or MSN.com who use formulaic headlines that have been proven to work again and again.  MSN has a head line “7 ADHD truths you may not   know”.  Replacing “ADHD” with your product name would give an instantly compelling headline.