It is very important to make your blog visitors to interact with your blog and to make them stay longer. The longer they spend time on your blog, the longer your contents get exposed. There are several ways to make this possible. One of the most easiest and simple way is to display random posts of your blog. Just display it under a post or in the sidebar or wherever you wish to, and it will do the rest by attracting your visitors to read more posts.

One of the best things about Wordpress is that the quantity of themes available on the internet. The numbers of themes available are astronomical. The enormous availability of themes is because of the open source licensing and is easy create to new themes. Web Designers can easily create new stunning and unique wordpress themes and release it for the public to use them. This short tutorial teaches you about how to install a wordpress theme on a self-hosted wordpress blog.

It’s always good to have better average time on site of a visitor. The more the visitor spends time on your site, the more chances that you can earn. Even sites like Yahoo.com struggles to increase the average time of their visitors.

Having a related posts plugin on your Wordpress blog or any other blogging platform or CMS will make your visitors to discover more interesting things on your site. If you think this plugin just lists out the posts related to the post the visitor is reading, then you are wrong. It also tempts visitors to keep on looking one post after the other. So this increases the average time on site. And chances are, you might get more clicks on ads.

Here are some of the plugins/modules for CMS’es:

Wordpress – Wordpress Related Posts
Drupal – Similar Entries
Joomla – Related Posts for MyBlog

This tutorial teaches you about how to optimize your WordPress blog to search engines in about 60 minutes. If you are getting started with blogging using WordPress, you can make your blog appear on radar of search results just in 2-3 weeks. But you will have to work a little which isn’t difficult either.

Before starting off with this tutorial, I assume you have your latest version of WordPress installed on your server. If not, I recommend you to upgrade it, because some plugins which I mention later in this tutorial may not compatible with your older version. And please register at Technorati.com before starting off (you will know why later). If you are already on those services, skip that step.

Now let’s get started.

I’ll begin with a short intro for those who don’t know what gravatar is. If you already know what gravatar is, skip to Process.

Gravatar is a small image or a picture that is used for your identification whenever you comment on others or in your blog which you have uploaded at Gravatar.com for a particular email.

Gravatars is a inbuilt feature of wordpress 2.5.1 and it works out-of-the-box. i.e without any plugins. But theme which you are using for your blog must be gravatar ready. Most of latest sports gravatars, but there are still designers who are neglecting to do add the feature. And if you are using a old theme, then you will have to work on it in order to make gravatar ready. I’ll tell you how to do it here in this tutorial. Please keep in your mind that your wordpress should be 2.5 and above otherwise you may require gravatar plugin.

This small tip is for “people who are not aware of Turbo feature in wordpress dashboard” only.
Turbo is a feature that lets you to store your entire wordpress dashboard aka the admin panel’s CSS/PHP and other core files locally on your computer, which enables faster navigation inside your wordpress dashboard. All this is done by using Google Gears. And (un)fortunately, Google Gears is only available for Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. Just keep in mind that Turbo is available only from Wordpress 2.5 or so.
No doubt, this feature is a boon for people who are on a dialup connection or other slower connections. But it does take a while to install gears and download required files for the Turbo feature. But in my opinion, its good to wait few minutes instead waiting every time you want to do something.