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.