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.