If you've got a multi-author blog and those bloggers have their own independent websites, they'll probably want and appreciate getting links from you.

Include links to all your author's websites in your sidebar rather than at the bottom of your page, because footer links don't get as much weight by the search engines. Or better yet, only include your list of author links from the home page rather than making it a site-wide link, which will also get partially discounted by the search engines.

Within every post that they author, include a link to their site. That will motivate them to post more often.

Also include with each post a link to their profile page (hosted on your blog). Each author profile page should contain a link to that author's site, a biographical statement (taken from the "About Yourself" field in their profile), and the posts that they've authored. Here is my profile page on BusinessBlogConsulting.com, for example.

Let them define the anchor text of the link to their site, since anchor text is such an important element for SEO (see my Blog SEO Tip on Anchor Text). The way I did it for BusinessBlogConsulting.com, which runs on WordPress, I had them specify the anchor text they wanted in the Nickname field on their edit profile page and I used that instead of their name.

You've probably heard me say this before, that links are the currency of the Web, at least as far as search engines are concerned. Therefore, no links = no rankings, and lousy links = lousy rankings.

I am speaking at a MarketingProfs virtual seminar on Feb. 16 on "Inside Secrets to Building Links for Online Publicity, Buzz and Search Engine Optimization" along with link guru Eric Ward. Sign up now!

One of the many topics we will be discussing in next week's webinar is "link baiting" — making your site an irrestistible link target for bloggers and site owners. The Art of Linkbaiting has some great suggestions (particularly if you've got a blog):

• Offer a niche-specific blogroll, tool, How-To, or compilation of news stories.
• Post a scoop.
• Expose a story as flawed or a fraud
• Be a contrarian about a story, product, or prominent blogger's opinion.
• Be humorous. Good topics include a bizzare pic of your subject, "10 things I hate about...", and "You know you're a when..."
• Publish or commission some original research
• Creative-Commons-license photos you made of an event you're blogging about
• Make available for free a theme, plugin or piece of software
• Start a meme that others can replicate and that links back to you (e.g. buttons/stickers/tools for bloggers/webmasters to post on their sites, contests, quizzes, surveys, etc.)

As you can probably tell, building links is both art and science. It requires a great set of tools and tactics, as well as loads of creative ideas.

One might even go so far as to valuate a site, such as a blog, on its links. If you have a blog, for fun you might try out the free tool at the Business Opportunities Weblog and see how much your blog is worth. The computation is based on the link-to-dollar ratio of the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal. According to the tool, my blog is worth over $40,000. Not bad for some random musings posted on an irregular basis! ;-)

From an search engine optimization perspective, the title tag is the most important thing on the page. It gets the most weight by the search engines.

Most blogs don't have search engine optimal title tags. (Heck, most sites in general don't have optimal title tags!) The best title tag is one that LEADS with the targeted keywords. But unfortunately most blogs lead with the name of the blog. Instead that should go at the end.

We just did some optimization to BusinessBlogConsulting.com and I'm happy to say that's now the case there: the blog name is at the end.

In addition, it's good to customize the title tag of your home page to have some good keywords in them. For BusinessBlogConsulting.com that meant including phrases like "corporate blogs" and "business blogging" and including both singular and plural forms "blog" and "blogs", as well as the verb tense "blogging". (The old title tag was "Business Blog Consulting". Now it's "Business Blog Consulting: Everything about Corporate Blogs and Business Blogging")

Creating a custom title tag for your blog's home page is well worth doing. Consider this: on this blog I decided to target the search phrase "web marketing blog". By simply changing the home page title tag from "Stephan Spencer's Scatterings" to "Stephan Spencer's Scatterings: Web Marketing Blog" and adding a mention of "web marketing blog" once in the body copy, I went from nowhere for "web marketing blog" in Google to currently #8 out of 55,200,000!

That's an important point, by the way: Make sure the keywords you are targeting aren't just in the title tag but also in the body copy as well. Otherwise it's not reinforcing your keyword focus to the search engines sufficiently. On BusinessBlogConsulting.com we just added "corporate blogs" to the home page title and body copy. Hopefully I'll be able to report back soon that BusinessBlogConsulting.com is highly ranked for "corporate blogs"!

UPDATE: BusinessBlogConsulting.com is now on page 2 in Google for "corporate blogs". Not bad for a couple minutes of effort!