On Singles Awareness Day, Up Your Odds of Finding Love Online

Celebrating so-called Singles' Awareness Day this Feb. 15 by signing on to an online dating service? Well, OkCupid, a free dating site, has some tips to help you maximize your hits, reports the New York Times.

OkCupid, which is based in New York City, was launched in 2004 by a group of Harvard mathematicians. With 735,000 unique visitors in January (according to comScore,) the site still has a long way to go before becoming the next Match.com or PlentyOfFish. But, thanks to a recently-launched blog offering statistically-based insight into how best to craft a profile, the site is gaining traction.

The folks at OkCupid say they catalogued photos on 7,000 profiles posted on their site, analyzing them for facial attitude (smiling vs. flirty), photo context (pet? drinking?), and skin (cleavage shot?), and reached some pretty counter-intuitive conclusions for relationship hopefuls. For example, they found that men shouldn't smile or look directly into the camera, while women should skip the sexy photos and opt instead for activity-oriented ones that show them playing the guitar or mountain-climbing.

When it comes to responding to a profile, OkCupid found that those emails that used words like "cool" and "fascinating" were more likely to get a response than those that used words like "beautiful" or "cutie." Now that's some welcome news! Seems that even pick up lines have to be more than skin deep.

“If you want worthwhile messages in your in-box, the value of being conversation-worthy, as opposed to merely sexy, cannot be overstated,” wrote OkCupid co-found Christian Rudder in the Jan. 20 post "The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures."

What makes the site different than, say, Match.com is that members answer a wide range of questions submitted by users, and then those answers are weighted and analyzed by several algorithms to calculate compatibility with other users.

Sam Yagan, site CEO, says since OkCupid launched their OkTrends blog six months ago, they've picked up 10,000 new members. He claims the site now has 1.1 million members, the majority of which are under the age of 35.

But whether you sign up for OkCupid or another kind of dating site, the tips offered in their detailed blog can provide some valuable insight into how to put your best face forward. Of course, you don't want to misrepresent yourself, but isn't it a relief that you don't have to pretend to be a Victoria's Secret model to get a response from a potential date? All you have to do is show you being you.

Photo courtesy of Facebook.