Blogroll — the word might have an incredibly geeky ring to it, but if you’re looking to build up your blogging cred, nothing can things jump-started quite like creating a blogroll. Put simply, it’s a list of links to other sites you like. They can be ones you read on a daily basis, ones you’d personally vouch for, or just friendly strangers who were kind enough to link to your blog.

But beyond simply generating good will, the link love has a more pragmatic purpose: If you’re looking to boost your visibility on Google (and other search engines), you’ll need to get linked to. Google may have a top secret search algorhythm, but it all pretty much boils down to simple arithmatic: More links to your blog = a higher search ranking. When you’re launching your new blog, link liberally.

Pete Abraham, author of the blockbuster LoHud Yankees blog, says that building up his blogroll was one of the initial keys to his blog taking off. He didn’t just link blindly, though; he asked for other sites to link back to him. In his words:

Every team has a network of fan blogs. Some are around for 5 days, some have been around 5 years and are great. You need to pick out 10 good ones, write the owners and say “I’m a beat writer, I’m trying to do a blog and I like the work you do. I’m putting up a link to you blog and I’d appreciate if you link to ours. Let me know the next time you do a post you’re proud of and I’ll link to it.”

That will get a positive responsive 85 percent of the time. Having a blog roll of fan blogs makes you part of the on-line community. Once the word-of-mouth spreads, you have an audience. If you frequent short posts, you’ll get people coming back as opposed to one long post a day.

Pete’s blog now gets about 1.5 million hits a month. There’s no guarantee you’ll reach the same level of success, but adding a couple dozen links to your sidebar will surely put your blog on the right path. Here’s how: