just because it may or maynot help with search rankigns doesn't mean those links and comments won't drive traffic. if you add a valuable comment to the blog then people are likely to click through from that site to your own, its not just about rankings

it's not free but yoast SEO have this awesome WP plugin, adds microformats etc - see benefits  @ http://yoast.com/wordpress/video-seo/

used it for a client, well worth it- adds something competition don't have for the most part

It's all been said but here are a few more tips to get your going with the perfect page titles

http://seoandy.com/optimisation/perfect-webpage-title/#sthash.lcH9PSFM.dpbs

Tom's point is spot on.

Syndication is a great traffic driver, no doubt - but it also means that the content usually worth a little less. Also implementing the canonical tag can be away around this but it will mean that the "copy" of the content will never get a chance to rank, though it will still drive some traffic.

The answer is always original content across the board - if you must repost on your own website use the canonical to point to the other site - show the love.

off topic: i was once asked "if i add a picture of a cute cat to any post would it become unique content?" ... answers on a post card to "sill questions here"

further to this you could look at having the image above some text and the text describes the image -- using z-index to layer them - hope that makes a little sense... if not google z-index