I am doing some SEO work for blokada.org looking to build backlinks for a blog article I wrote on our community forum and I'm wondering if it is a good idea to do link swaps

Link swaps? NO. 3-way linking - Yes

What makes it better?

Google is just really good at noticing you are doing link swaps ( A->B; B->A) and doesn't really include those signals. On the other hand, they are not that good at figuring out if you are not directly exchanging links ( A->B; C->A)