The more directories you submit to with anchor links pointing back to your website, the better your site should rank.

But hold on....you can't just submit the same article to 100 different directories because of the "duplicate content" penalty. So now, if you want to be effective, you have to rewrite that article each time you submit it. Changing just a few words isn't good enough; you have to change a good 30-50% of the article.

Too much work, right? Better just stick with a few directories, right?

Wrong!

If you submit the exact same article to 100 directories it is true that it won't be as beneficial to your rankings as 10 re-worked articles, but let's look from a different angle.

Search engines send out "bots" to search the web and index the numerous pages. They will just take the first article if you have several articles on several different sites, instead of taking the same one several different times. Makes sense. But doesn't help you with your original intention of improving your search ranking.

It is not practical to write 10, 20, and more different versions of each article, however.

Submitting many articles to many different sites is still worth it in the long run when you consider:

1)People still visit these sites and you are giving yourself a broader audience

2)Search engines love one-way links that point back to your site, and the more you have the better you rank. Use the resource box with your targeted keyword as an html link back to your site, and you will help your SEO cause.

3)Webmasters are always looking for content and the more chance you give yourself to be found, the more likely you are to get your article requested for content on another website, giving you more exposure.

Don't worry about how many versions you need to write. Consider your goals. Is it to get listed first on the search engines, or to get your content out there and build links? Certainly the first page of Google will accomplish that, but that could take months or years.

If you want to win the article marketing wars, just get it out there. There are websites that can help you submit to several directories at once with little effort.