Linking

This past week in my Advanced Composition class - I have been introduced to a whole new was of looking at blogs and posting blogs.
Linking.
Have any of you heard what this is?
According to Dictionary.com a link in Computer Science is "a segment of text or a graphical item that serves as a cross-reference between parts of a hypertext document or between files or hypertext documents." Sounds easy enough, right?
From what I have been learning this week - linking is a great way to advertise other websites, connect blog readers to the information being used in the post and builds credibility of the blogger page. I find this all interesting, because I have never used blogging except to portray my opinion. And that is fine. But not everyone wants to see just my opinion, web users want to see if others agree with my point of view and even see if people disagree. From now on I am making a firm decisions to link atleast once in every blog - it will give more visual play to my page and help readers see how my thoughts are played out in other websites across the internet.
A question I have had since I have been introduced to linking is: What is the benefit of linking? What are its pro's and con's? There are two places that gave solid reasoning behind the need to link and the first one gave a Top 10 list of reasons to link. The most interesting reason to me was how it would build search engine trust in your site. I didn't even know that it was possible to build the trust of a universal search engine - there are probably alot of benefits! And I am curious to see what it could do for a website. As for the second one, it goes through different words and describes the benefits of marketing on the Internet and how linking really helps. There webpage goal says "Internet Marketing Search Engine Optimization." That is exactly what it is doing, helping web users optimize the search engine the best for their business and/or blog.
Hope this is helpful and am looking forward to utilizing my new "linking skills" throughout both of my blogs.