This is a very good and comprehensive post!
I have the #1 'article directories' page on Google currently and so was especially interested in your part about submitting articles to get inbound links and, of course, the associated traffic that goes along with having mass distribution across the net.
In addition to the pointers you've given, I'd also suggest authors vary their author resource box if it's at all viable and if they intend to submit their article to as many directories as they can find (my article resource has over 180 currently!).
By doing this they can link to their site using a variety of applicable keywords which not only will help their rankings for each one, but also alleviate any potential 'penalty' Google and the other SEs might place on your site if they suddenly see 100s or 1000s of webpages suddenly crop up with the exact same keyword and surrounding text linked to your site.
It's a bit of a grey area as to whether the SEs do penalize for such things, but there's a guerilla tactic called "Google Bowling" that can be used to penalize an opponent's site, and it works very similar to this.
So vary the resource box, both for the general content and whatever keywords you want associated with your site... and consider also adding your site's url in its full form (the 'http://' and all) at the evry end, just in case a site featuring your article isn't using the html version of your article (thus the linked keyword wouldn't work) - that way, on some formats, the url *will* be a link (or at least it makes it easier for a reader to cut and paste the url into their browser.
Just a couple of random thoughts. 
Again, great article!
Commenting by HaloScan
