As the owner of an online business, you need to form a solid base of clients as soon as possible, and, for this, your site must be listed as high as possible in SERPs. According to many internet marketing gurus, applying the right search engine optimization techniques can do that for you, but, financially speaking, is SEO a profitable investment?

On one hand, in order to get to the first positions in SERPs, your site must offer original, informative and relevant information, to be a valuable addition to its niche. Unfortunately, due to the amount of information available and to the efforts other site owners make to promote their own businesses, your content must be also published on a regular basis with some rules to follow regarding the use of the keywords you targeting.

When it comes to promoting your business, any marketing strategy is welcomed. However, instead of experimenting, why not go for solutions that have been already declared efficient? For instance, how about marking your business on Google maps? It is the best way to make your entrance on the local market.

With a simple Google account, you can add your company to the local map, revealing your activity and your contact details to any potential customers. This is a free service for both individuals and businesses, with registering procedures that take only a few minutes to be completed.

Are you tired of your day job? Do you own a website and you have no idea how to make it profitable? The answer is simple: you need backlinks. But perhaps we are moving too fast, so let us take things one at a time.

A profitable website is one that lures a lot of visitors and turns them into paying customers. In order to attract visitors, you need a high position in SERPs, because most people use the search engines to find what they need, and, if you are not on the first results pages, no one will ever know that you exist.

Unfortunately, Google and the other search engines only pay attention to the popular websites, with thousands of links from different internet users pointing to them. It is just like when looking for a job. Everywhere you go, they ask for experience, but how are you supposed to gain experience if no one will hire you without it?

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.