7 Best Tech Stocks to Buy for 2017

Going into 2017, technology is seeping into almost every aspect of everyday life. From retail to travel and transportation, hardly anything is purely analog nowadays.

From an investor's perspective, that's quite an opportunity. As you enter a new year and perhaps look to rebalance your portfolio, the technology sector still boast plenty of opportunity.

Though there are plenty of great Silicon Valley companies, the following names, for one reason or another, appear to be seven of the best tech stocks to buy for 2017.

[See: The 10 Best Ways to Buy Tech Stocks.]

Facebook (FB). In the wake of the 2016 elections and the controversy surrounding a plethora of "fake news" spread on social media, Facebook's enormous influence has never been clearer. With such ubiquity comes financial power, and financial power is precisely what investors love to see. Going into 2017, Facebook is coming off an incredibly strong third quarter in which revenue surged 56 percent and earnings per share jumped 165 percent year-over-year.

With 1.8 billion monthly active users and 84 percent of all advertising revenue coming from mobile, Facebook is without a doubt one of the best tech stocks to buy for 2017.

Amazon.com (AMZN). With the best-in-class in social networking already covered, the next best tech stock to buy covers the ever-growing area of e-commerce, which is finally winning a decades-long battle with brick-and-mortar retailers. Amazon is the best in class here, and, like Facebook, is led by a brilliant founder/CEO in Jeff Bezos. Bezos's core principles of customer satisfaction, low prices and convenience are pillars he has used to build Amazon into America's most dominant online retailer from its humble beginnings as an online bookstore in the 1990s. Due to its cloud computing arm Amazon Web Services, AMZN is finally consistently profitable, and a reliable stock to buy and hold for the long-run.

Cisco Systems (CSCO). Cisco won't give you the growth opportunities that a Facebook or Amazon will, but it's much less volatile and more predictable than either AMZN or FB, making it a potential portfolio pillar. On top of that, it pays a hefty 3.3 percent dividend, which is meaningfully higher than the 2.2 percent you'll get from the 10-year Treasury.

The networking and communications giant has been a mainstay in Silicon Valley since the 1990s, when it was a perennial high-flyer. Nowadays it's far more useful as a cash cow, reliably churning out between $10 billion and $13 billion in free cash flow each year.

Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL). Phil Bak is CEO of ACSI Funds, an asset management firm that offers a hedge fund and ETF. ASCI Funds invests in companies rated highest by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, as it believes lower customer satisfaction leads to lower stock performance over time.

"Google saw an 8 percent surge in their ACSI score this year, meaning their customer satisfaction continues to increase. They're entering the phone market at exactly the right time with users increasingly frustrated with iOS updates, the iPhone's disappearing headphone jack and Samsung's battery issues."

[Read: 4 Ways to Invest in Games.]

Indeed, Google's Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones, which come with unlimited cloud photo storage and the well-reviewed AI-powered Google Assistant, could mark a new era for GOOG. If the Pixel only took in 10 percent of the revenue the iPhone did in fiscal 2016, GOOG would increase its revenue by $13.67 billion, or a whopping 18.2 percent of Alphabet's 2015 revenue.

Intel Corp. (INTC). Intel, like Cisco, is another reliable blue-chip tech stock to buy for 2017. In 2015, the chip-maker churned out nearly $12 billion in free cash flow, paid investors $4.6 billion in dividends and bought back $3 billion in stock. That's a run-of-the-mill year for INTC nowadays, and it's practically impossible to find another established tech company with a record so consistent.

And although Intel may have a reputation as an old-school supplier of PC chips, it's definitely transitioning into the modern era. In fact, Google just enlisted Intel as a partner to help enterprises bring their data to the cloud, and INTC plans on building its mobile, tablet, and IOT business out for years to come.

Electronic Arts (EA). If 2017 looks anything like 2016, video games -- and mobile games, for that matter -- will be pretty popular. There's hardly a better way to capitalize on that trend than the game publisher EA, whose portfolio of name-brand video games is about as good as it gets. EA's intellectual property includes FIFA, Madden NFL, Star Wars, Battlefield, the Sims, and Need for Speed. Perhaps the biggest reason EA is one of the top tech stocks to buy in 2017 is its push into digital gaming, where scaling up is easier, margins are higher, and subscription opportunities arise. Trading at just 20 times earnings, EA stock is a steal today.

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT). For the first decade-plus of the 2000s, Microsoft was a punchline in the tech community, lagging behind innovators like Apple ( AAPL), who beat MSFT to digital music, MP3 players, smartphones and tablets -- verticals worth hundreds of billions of dollars. But after former CEO Steve Ballmer's ouster in 2014, current CEO Satya Nadella has righted the ship, pivoting Microsoft into the cloud. Going into 2017, Microsoft Azure is second only to Amazon Web Services as a cloud platform, and Azure revenue grew an incredible 116 percent last quarter. It's been quite a while since MSFT has had an internal project with the potential that Azure does.

[See: 8 Easy Ways to Make Money.]

On top of that, MSFT pays a 2.5 percent dividend and bought back $14.8 billion of stock in fiscal 2016.

John Divine is an investing reporter for U.S. News & World Report, where he covers financial markets and the economy, with a focus on individual stock analysis. He has been an investor himself for over 10 years, and has been writing professionally about stocks and investing for the last five years. He previously wrote about the stock market for The Motley Fool and InvestorPlace, and his work has appeared on Yahoo! Finance, MSN Money, and AOL DailyFinance. He graduated from Appalachian State University in 2011 with a bachelor's degree in finance and banking. At Appalachian, he was a member of the Bowden Investment Group, a team of students that ran a real-money portfolio worth over $100,000. You can follow him on Twitter or give him the Tip of the Century at jdivine@usnews.com.