We are in the very early stages of a series centered around the concept of “Building of a Successful Blog.” Next in the series, we will be discussing some of the activities you need to do to get the right foundation to build upon. One of the activities in building a successful blog is linking. And I am not talking about putting up a blogroll as the key to your linking activities.

While I was reading some of my favorite blogs, I came across a great post on Jason Fall’s blog called, “Five Blogs I Read.” While I enjoyed checking out the blogs Jason mentioned. What really caught my attention was the very first paragraph of the post. I have been struggling to come up with a name for the linking I felt bloggers should be doing, other then throwing up a blogroll and praying someone would notice. Jason used the term I was looking for, “Organic Link Exchage.” I thought bingo, that is it.

“Organic link exchange is where a blogger cites a post or a blog from another with a link”

There is no better definition for the linking I have been talking about. As I have stated before, linking to a relevant blog who has a relevant post, which relates to what you are posting about is powerful. And its apparent Jason agrees. Linking is one of those easy to do blogging tricks which will increase your traffic. Not only will your readers appreciate the “organic link”, so will the blogger you are linking too.

The blogger you are linking to will know you are linking when they get the trackback. Most of us, at least I do, check out the blogs that link to us. And if that blog is relevant to what I am blogging about, rest assured, I will continue to visit them in my RSS feeder and I will link to them in the future too. But I won’t be linking to them in a blogroll. I will be doing the same thing which brought me to their blog. I will link to them in a relevant post that relates to the two of our blogs.

Jason does bring up one point of interest in his post. “There is some thought that tit-for-tat links cancel each other out and Google discredits them, it’s the way a lot of top bloggers built their followings.” Does this “organic link exchange” harm our rankings in Google? Quite frankly, I don’t care. It works and I have increased my own following and traffic by doing so as well. It makes more sense to me to do “organic linking” then to do a link exchange, “where two website or blog owners agree in premeditation to add links to one another’s sites.” I would think Google would discount a sidebar blogroll that looks the same on two different blogs or at least similar. Then to discount “organic link exchange” that is done by two blogs inside two different blog post about relevant and related topics.

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