There are numerous good article directories out there and when you submit your articles, you are going to want to use more than one directory. There are a number of benefits to using several directories rather than one. One benefit is the more articles that you have out there circulating on the internet, the more traffic you will get coming to your site.

And another benefit is different ezine publishers will go to different article directories as a source for their free articles. So by using multiple directories you will reach a much broader audience. Now, when writing and submitting so many articles to so many directories, it can be tempting to take one article and submit it to multiple directories to save time and effort.

It also can be tempting to take a post that you have from your web site submit it to article directories. In a word: don't! It will have less benefit than you would think. This is because of what is referred to as the "duplicate content" penalty. Google, Yahoo, and other search engines want to see fresh, original content on web sites.

When they see the exact same article in dozens or hundreds of locations across the internet, here is what they do. They determine which article appeared first, and they give that web page more importance and precedence in the search engine rankings.

Then, they assume that all of the other articles that appeared later are copies of the first article that appeared. They will put any web page with that article on it very low in the rankings. It will be so hard for people to find when they search the internet that it might as well not be there at all. This means that there is not a lot of point in taking the exact same article and just submitting it again and again to different directories.

A much better solution is to take the article that you wrote for one directory...and rewrite it from scratch. You have already done the research for that article. You are familiar the subject matter. Say you have an article on killing garden pests with all natural pesticides. You have already looked up all of that information and discovered some great natural pesticide resources. That's the time consuming part of article writing-the research.

Now, once you have written your first article, just use all of the facts that you have already gathered and start over. It will be much faster with each subsequent rewriting of the article. If the first article took 30 minutes, the rewritten version should take about 10 minutes each. The same goes with taking a post or article from your web site and reusing it by sending it to article directories. Again, take that same information but rewrite it so it is fresh and original.

The whole point of writing articles is to get traffic to your web site and you will get much better results from the search engines, and therefore, a lot more traffic if you use original content.