I'm looking for suggestions on how to effectively use blogging and social media to improve my rankings in Google and the other SE's.

I've got the basics set-up. Blog on my web site, RSS feed with my domain (via feedburner), permanent links for every post, Digg-Furl-Del.ico.us links and a listing on Technocrati. I've also submitted my blog or feed to every blog portal that I can find. (For those interested, I use Top 55 to find blog and RSS directories. You have to manually submit to each directory, so if you haven't been to this site, a lot a good amount of time for this.)

I saw an article on SEOChat suggesting that I use the comments section of every post to mention any back-links. The idea was that this would build goodwill, make my blog seem more authoritative and encourage others to back-link as well. This strategy would create more outbound links however. Any thoughts on this?

Or does somebody have other suggestions?