Article marketing is a popular way to market one’s website these days.  This usually consists of submitting marketing articles to article databases across the Internet, which users can reprint freely as long as they include your company’s information and links, a section usually referred to as a “Resource Box.”

But should you also load the articles onto your own hosted FTP website??  While having the same information on your own site can be beneficial to potential customers, reprinting the same article on your site can actually get you dinged for duplicate content.  The search engines actually do try to rank websites according to quality, and they figure if you have the exact same article found elsewhere on the Internet, your site can’t be as high quality as others that have unique content.

There is a way around this, though.  Instead of posting the entire article word for word, write two different versions.  Once you finish the article, just rewrite it all over again, without looking at the first version.  This will help you come up with two completely different articles — one for your website, and one for the article directories.

Although this approach will take a little more of your time (or perhaps a little more of your money, if you are paying a writer to create the articles for you), it is worth it in the long run to avoid getting your website dinged for having duplicate content!