The articles that authors write for an article directory are free.  Why would anyone want to submit free articles?  There are actually two reasons for this.  First of all, submitting articles to an article directory will expose you to many new readers.  Secondly, as a web site owner you want to have as many backlinks to your web site as possible.  This is because the search engines see these backlinks as a good thing and thus rank your web site better.  One way in which to get these backlinks is by submitting articles to these directories.

Once you have a knowledge and understanding of these article directories you, as a web site marketer, may feel that this would be a great place to go whenever you are in need of an article for your web site.  After all, there is a wide range of information on the topic of your web site available right at your fingertips.  However, there is a drawback to this in the fact that each article has an author bio attached to the end of it.  Herein are a few sentences that entice the reader to visit the writer’s web site.  While you can freely publish these articles on your web site, you have to leave this bio attached, which means that you will be sending traffic to a competitor’s web site.

Another thing that must be taken into consideration whenever you use articles from article directories is that other people will also be using these articles as well.  This means that you will be caught by the duplicate content filter that Google has in place.  Once you are caught your web site will be penalized as its ranking within this search engine will drop.  You do not want to have to deal with this and thus you should write your own articles in order to avoid this situation.

While all of this may sound great, you should know that the process of article marketing is not perfect.  Today Google is taking note of this process and doing away with any backlink that leads to duplicate content.

Thankfully, there are some solutions to this problem.  This is where article rewriters come into play.  These folks remove, replace and reword paragraphs and sentences in articles so that these articles will appear unique to the Search Engines.  Most of the time, this is all that they will do and thus the process is far from perfect.  This is because such articles are not legitimate content.

Many of the articles that are created in this manner are extremely difficult to understand.  Of course, this means that nobody is going to spend time reading these articles, much less look at the resource box and follow the link to your web site.  Without this type of traffic there will be no sales and thus the articles are worthless.

Today there are also computer programs that have been created to do this work.  Unfortunately, there is a downside to these programs as well.  While they do require some human input they also require a person to read through the entire article and do some editing at the end.  This means that you will be putting in more work with such programs than you would if you hired a content rewriter.

So, now that you are able to see both the benefits and drawbacks to both of these option, you may be wondering what you should do in order to get unique articles for your marketing endeavors.  The best option is to actually hire a copywriter to write original articles for you to use in your marketing.  In reality, nothing will ever be better for your web sites than these original articles.  This means that you really should avoid article rewriters of any kind and pay for the original copywriter that your marketing efforts deserve.