Submitting articles to article directories is a proven to attract more visitors to your site, give you a higher page rankings and, ultimately, make you more money. However, search engines and article directories are getting tougher on the articles you submit. In this article we give you some tips on how to submit articles successfully.

Changes in the way search engines and article directories work in recent times mean that article marketers need to be a bit more savvy about how they go about submitting their articles. There was a time when you could write a good article, submit it to hundreds, if not thousands, of directories and watch your profits grow. These days it is not quite so simple.

The easiest way to get your article published on a lot of directories quickly is to use an article submission service. It is possible to do it by hand but this is a laborious and tedious task, unless you submit to just a small number of directories.

There are many article submission services available online, both free and paid, or you can invest in software that will do the job for you. These can be effective but there is a danger that article directories will reject your content if they suspect you are using an automated submission method. In a worst case scenario you could be banned from submitting to the directory again.

So, if you are using an article submission service check that their methods will not cause you problems with the directories. If you are submitting articles yourself, do not submit too many articles to any one directory at the same time.

Duplicate content

An even bigger problem for article marketers is that the major engines now penalize duplicate content. In the past you could submit an article to 100 article directories and the likes of Google and Yahoo! would award you for having 100 backlinks to your website. You would also be awarded when the article was picked up and used by other websites. However, this has changed.

The search engines can now recognize duplicate content. So, even if your article appears on 1,000 different websites you will still only be awarded for one backlink. You will of course gain traffic that accesses your website directly through the link provided with your article. However, this makes it much more difficult to use article submissions as a search engine optimization tool.

The only way to get around this is to submit a unique version of each article you write to each article directory. Again, if you only submit articles to a small number of directories you could tweak each article yourself so you have a number of different versions. However, if you are submitting to hundreds of directories this is out of the question.

It is not really known just how much an article needs to be changed to become unique. Some argue simply switching paragraphs within an article is enough, while others think that the text within the paragraphs needs to be changed too.

There are a number of possible solutions to this problem. Many article submission services have been quick to move to address this issue. As well as submitting your articles to multiple article directories they will also create different versions of each article for you or provide you with a tool for doing so yourself.

Alternatively, you could invest in some software that helps with the re-writing of articles. These are also known as article spinners and will automatically replace words with other words of a similar meaning. For example, the word 'small' might be changed with the word 'little' and so on. However, the software needs to be configured to do so manually. Others will simply change the order of paragraphs in articles. This can also be very time consuming and may not do enough to make the different versions unique in the eyes of the search engines.

One final option could be to get outside help. There are many websites such as elance.com and getafreelancer.com where you can post rewriting projects for professional writers. The quality of the work will vary but rates can be quite cheap.

It may be a good idea to try out these methods and see how they work for you. You will have to invest some money but it will be worth it if you find a workable solution to duplicate content.

Writing articles and submitting them to article directories can be as beneficial a marketing and SEO tool as it has ever been. However, doing it successfully is a little trickier than it was before.