A lot of people consider blogging a waste of time and money. However, most SEO companies recommend blogs for their customers’ websites, claiming that they bring a lot of benefits.

To bring some light into the matter, lets remember what search engine optimization gurus claim that Google loves the most in ranking websites: backlinks and original content published on regular basis. As far as the content is concerned, blogging is certainly the best way to lure the spiders and to make them index your website.

However, if you build your blog posts around relevant keywords for you niche and you link those keywords to your homepage, you get contextual backlinks, and, indeed, the conclusion that blogging can be considered a contextual link building technique is correct.

In terms of backlinks, things seem a little more complicated due to the fact that there are several types of backlinks and it is hard to tell which type is more appreciated according to the Google algorithms. However, every backlink represents a step forward and blogging can bring you hundreds or thousands of inbound links.

As you already know, one of the most important parts of SEO is link building, and, since the word has it that guest blogging is the best link building strategy, let us see what building links this way involves.

1. Identifying the Blogs You Can Write for

Choose a few keywords you consider relevant for your niche and use them as a search query. You should be able to identify several blogs in the search results, even if that means reviewing several results pages. Make a list or bookmark them, so that you can easily access them later on.

In the past year or so, search engine optimization has changed considerably due to the new Google algorithms set in place to counter black hat link building practices. Unfortunately, because of these algorithms – specifically the “Panda” update, which was designed to target sites that had too great a number of exact-match anchor texts – many quality and high-ranking websites started being penalized in the process, as well.

Apart from the Panda algorithm, Google had also launched the Penguin update which was essentially designed to level the playing field by adopting new factors that would influence the page rank of a website. While Panda mainly focuses on content related issues such as anchor texts, Penguin also deals with the presence of irrelevant or “suspicious” link profiles.

Why Is Backlink Diversity Important?

In search engine optimization, opting for a strategy of diversifying the inbound links to your websites is one of the best ways of not only avoiding penalization from Google, but of also giving your competitors a run for their money. This is because Google simply doesn’t “like” seeing that your site only gets backlinks from .com and .net websites or from the same IP address.

An obvious solution is to use quality link building services in order to promote IP diversity for your inbound links by finding forum platforms and other types of websites that use individual IPs. Also, you can try getting .gov and .edu backlinks apart from those you get from regular .com sites.

Another good way of diversifying your links is the use of a variety of platforms. If your search engine optimization strategy works solely through blog commenting for example, you can also try getting backlinks by using methods such as article marketing, social media marketing, automated social bookmarking or even by promoting your links on streaming video sites. Some link building services can be an invaluable asset when it comes to making this work.

Apart from getting you on friendly terms with Google, such a diversified SEO strategy will also allow you to gain an upper hand on many of your competitors, seeing as many are still confused about what they can do to adapt their strategies to the new Google “rules”.

You already know that SEO (search engine optimization) refers to a process that aims to affect the visibility of a website among the search results offered by a search engine, through the relevance of the search terms and other strategies, not as an effect of pay per click advertising. The search results that are not related to advertisements are known as organic search results.

Lately, social signals have started to play important part in Google’s algorithm . Social signals that come from social networks have different importance to different search engines. Understanding how these signals are used is important in  search engine optimization.

There’s a lot of debate going on in the world of Internet marketing about SEO vs PPC, and while they are both great strategies to increase website visibility, there is still one question that seems to be preoccupying webmasters: which of the two is actually more efficient?
For starters, we need to explain the two terms, so everyone can have a clear idea what they are actually referring to.

What does PPC stand for?

PPC is an abbreviation from the term “Pay per click”. The concept is easy to understand and is one of the best known Internet advertising models, which is used to direct traffic to a website through an ad. When these ads are clicked, the user is directed to the specified website. The advertiser pays the owner of the website that publishes their ad, a fixed price for each click. Websites that use this advertising model will display an ad that corresponds to the keyword search or the content of the accessed page.