I am pretty new to article marketing, and I hear conflicting reports all the time about whether it's better to submit an article to multiple article directories, or if it's better to submit an article to just one good directory (i.e., EzineArticles.com) for uniqueness purposes. It's my understanding the search engines will see a unique article as much more "valuable" and rank it higher, but does this value drop if the same article is submitted to 20 other directories? Should I just say screw the search engines and just go for as many backlinks as possible by submitting the same article to multiple directories? For anyone out there who has more than just a month or two of article marketing experience (like me ), which is the better way to go? I want the benefit of direct traffic traffic and quality backlinks - is there a way to have both? Any help is greatly appreciated!!
First of all, I am not an article marketer expert, but I can share you my ideas. Actually, there had been so many debates about that duplicate content especially when submitting the same articles to directories. Although it's not really clear to me about that ranking problem, I would still suggest that you avoid too many duplicate content. This is to avoid that article with the same everything to be on top of search engine. If that article is from your blog, your blog will most likely be much lower than your submissions. Just my 2 cents though.
It's not really known for sure, but the pros out there, if you can really call them that, say that the first article that is submitted, and it is spidered, is the one that gets indexed. All others are ignored. But the way I look at it (if I submitted articles, that is), and I use common sense, I would want as many people reading my articles as possible, so I would submit them to as many sources as possible. ... And that would be other webmasters' sites. With search engines, you FIRST have to land high enough to be even seen! In addition to that, you won't get that many clicking on it anyway, even if you are lucky enough to land high enough to be seen. In other words, I'd rather have 1,000 people reading, than 100. So, look at it that way.
I would say submit it to as much as directories as possible but keep it different from your website content or blog content.
I have had some success just using EzineArticles but did a lot of keyword research before hand and used long tail keywords.